There is no waste in Galts Gultch.
I would guess that there would be, just like there are today (and were back in the 30’s even more so I imagine). There will always be someone who is unable or unwilling to pay for someone to do some service for them, such as trash collection (was trash collection outside of cities even common in the 30’s?), or maybe the logistics would preclude someone from it being economically feasible to collect their trash (if they are, say, X miles away from the nearest trash route making it more expensive in time or fuel to collect their trash). I also imagine that there would be some people who would be so lazy or uncaring that they would just let the trash pile up on their own property, and that there might be legal disputes if the trash on someones property blew over into the property of someone else. There would have to be laws even in Rand’s fantasy universe.
Ahh! So the magical hand of the marketplace might leave some people un-served, even in the Gulch! (You see where I’m going with this, yes?) Your final sentence is spot on. But it may require more than just laws. Laws may prevent (or reduce the incidence of) my dumping my trash on your property, or even perhaps from just piling it up on mine until the rats and the runoff impact you next door. But laws won’t prevent me from living too far (by whatever profitability model) from all competing trash haulers to be picked up. I may be part of that unserved subset. And, while I’m in favor of individual responsibility and all, my bike just doesn’t handle loads of trash very well. When I can afford a new tire for it, that is.
So even the fantasy universe seems to require (I’ll say it softly) some form of trash collection over and above that provided by for-profit haulers, if for no other reason than to protect society from the perils of unhauled trash. Maybe (shudder) a gulch-wide cooperative association to which all Gulchians belong, merely by virtue of being Gulchians, providing trash hauling service. Paid for by, not the poor and tiny subset of people who can’t get commercial hauling; after all, they can’t get it because their individual circumstances make hauling their trash cost prohibitive already. But paid for (screams and shrieks) by everybody. Call it government, and call those taxes. To protect society, dontchaknow.
I read all 1200 pages or so of Atlas Shrugged in a few days. It wasn’t a literary masterpiece, but it was a page turner (except for Galt’s 200 page speech towards the end, that got tedious). It actually introduced me to a lot of libertarian ideas, and convinced me of a few of them, at a time when I was coming out of my teenage “I want to be a communist revolutionary just like Che Guevara and Tom Morello” phase.
The characters were two-dimensional and the dialog was stilted, and I could feel myself being manipulated as I read it. Still, it’s something I would suggest people read, if only for the disorienting experience of having a love/hate relationship with the very book you’re in the middle of. Also, it makes you think. Love it or hate it, it’s a thought provoking novel.
This talk of Galt’s Gulch reminds me of how pissed I was when it turned out a magical machine was responsible for it all. It jumped the shark at that point.
It might, but there are examples in our imperfect world (per Rand) where trash collection is managed by for-profit haulers who service even the poorest. I have property out in the country, and I pay for a private hauler to show up once per week and collect. This same hauler serves several other individuals who live in, at best, a single-wide trailer and collect welfare. They are still able to afford the hauler for that garbage that they don’t either compost or burn. The hauler is willing to collect the incremental income from them, since he also gets my timely payments as well.
So, in certain situations, a private hauler with an opt-in service works just fine.
Summary of anecdotal:
- My primary home in suburbia - I pay Waste Management to collect weekly.
- My secondary home in an urban location - trash collection is part of my rent for my apartment.
- My tertiary hom in the country - trash collection is handled by an independent (and I can also haul large loads myself to the dump).
I would assume Galt’s Gulch would have similar services offered.
As for Rand - it isn’t her estate value, it is her annual income that would be interesting to me. For all I know she was eating fine caviar every night, alongside a bottle of Silver Oak.
[QUOTE=CannyDan]
Ahh! So the magical hand of the marketplace might leave some people un-served, even in the Gulch! (You see where I’m going with this, yes?)
[/QUOTE]
I see where you are going, but not sure why you think it’s such a stunning revelation. In the context of the book, did Rand ever say that everyone, everywhere would magically have all of their needs served by the ‘magical hand of the marketplace’? Has any free market type ever said this, outside of the context of the book under discussion? Did Rand, outside of the context of the book under discussion ever say this?
Since this goes beyond the question asked in the OP (i.e. who collects the trash in Galt’s Gulch), it’s probably something that belongs in another thread, but broadly no system is going to take care of 100% of the needs of every single person in the system. What you want to look at is, what takes care of the maximum number of people and gives them the maximum quality of life? And that’s going to vary (obviously, looking at the various successful capitalist oriented system hybrids in use today) from country to country, depending on what the citizens in those countries are looking for and willing to tolerate.
Not to be flip, but that would certainly suck. However, it’s your choice to live there…you could always move closer to the infrastructure. Again, no system is ever going to meet 100% of peoples needs for all goods and services all the time. There are many places in the US and Europe that don’t provide all the services equally to every citizen regardless of where they live, and that will be the case in 1930’s fantasy Randian worlds just the same as in our real world.
Bummer. Your choice would be to move or endure the privation of not having someone take up your trash…or riding that bike more. I’m unsure why you think this is a gotcha, or how this is substantially different from our real world today (certainly not of the real world back in the 30’s).
Um…I’m not seeing that as a given, to say it equally softly. That’s YOUR assumption and expectation, but wouldn’t necessarily be my own. If you live to far out for trash services then that’s really your problem, and something you are going to have to deal with…similar to if you live in a rural and isolated location today you might not get high speed internet, 3/4G cell phone coverage or even basic things like central water, power or sewer. If that’s the case, you would need to do something about it. Perhaps you could start your own business catering to other folks in similar predicaments (I actually did this on a small scale for internet access in a small rural town in Virginia about 15 years ago). Or you could move. Or endure.
We pay taxes now, but not everyone gets 100% of the goods and services available to all of society. I, personally don’t have any issue with taxes btw, but you might want to consider that my own taxes don’t pay for garbage services where I live…I pay a fee to Waste Management to come and pick up my trash. One of my neighbors doesn’t want to pay, so he carts his trash to the local landfill (and pays $5 bucks every 2 weeks) in his truck (personally, I think he’s a nut and it’s a freaking waste AND stupid, but then he didn’t ask my opinion).
And your answer would be wrong. The correct answer is: an enterprising individual who could provide the labor to get the job done at a price that the people who wanted trash removed thought was worth it.
That is really insignificant. It’s merely a device to allow an alternative society. If she had written the book today she might have teleported people to another planet.
A friend in high school moved pretty far out into the suburbs and was surprised to find out that he had to may for garbage removal. He was looking into this when one day he was going to work and walked into his garage and saw someone taking out the trash. He was furious that the person just assumed he’d be paying, as opposed to knock on the door or sending him a letter and letting him no of the service. The result was that for two years he took his own garbage down to the business he owned and disposed of it there.
The simplest method is to have the city governance of Galt’s Gulch institute a municipal garbage collection: the laborers could form an association to negotiate their remuneration.
An even more interesting question how do the isolated elites generate their wealth, not being a part of wider society, without a large body of workers to produce and a large body of consumers to purchase the results of their genius ? And what currency would they use since their stocks of the holy dollar are worthless outside the American world ?
Perhaps swapping products and labour without cash as in primitive barter ? Or having Galt Dollars ? If so, there would be a severe devaluation compared to regular dollars in an isolated system — I imagine the North Korean currency is neither stable nor buoyant — and some appointed body would have to administer the currency, maybe a state bank like the Fed ?
I mean, this is just getting ridiculous. But, to answer your question about currency, they used gold coinage, not paper currency. While today that probably wouldn’t work, I’m guessing that in the 30’s and in the context of the actual story if they ever did want to buy anything in the outside world with their currency (which, in the context of the story they probably wouldn’t have) that a gold coin would be worth a gold coin, depending on it’s weight and purity. Of course, only at the end of the book (when in the story civilization completely collapsed) did they seal their borders against the rest of the world. Up to that point, they only lived in the gulch a few weeks a year for the most part, and had jobs in the outside world using outside dollars (that, in the story, became increasingly more and more worthless).
The answer as regards the 30’s is that there wasn’t nearly so much “trash” because we were not so dependant on packaging. My grandparents lived in the 30’s well into the 50’s. Table scraps went to the dog, what the dog missed went to the chickens, so on and so forth. If you don’t buy a bunch of stuff that comes in boxes, you don’t have to get rid of the boxes.
Galt’s Gulch reminds one of the Aspen problem: lots of rich folks buying up property, rents go sky high, and the kind of people who work retail counters and that sort of thing can’t afford to live there. And also can’t afford to live elsewhere and commute unless you get a barista job that pays $17 an hour.
Galt, if I recall correctly over the intervening decades, recruited the “producers”, architects, scientists, engineers… What about roofers, cement finishers, bricklayers?
What about bankers and stock brokers? What do they “produce”? Well, no problem, they will make perfectly good bicycle messengers. Day care. No lawyers, of course, goes without saying…
[QUOTE=elucidator]
Galt, if I recall correctly over the intervening decades, recruited the “producers”, architects, scientists, engineers… What about roofers, cement finishers, bricklayers?
[/QUOTE]
As noted earlier in this thread (and, again, in the book itself :p) he and his organization recruited men and women of ability, be they roofers, bricklayers or bankers and architects. Recall that many of Rearden’s men were recruited (well, ‘recall’ assuming you read the book and didn’t toss it aside in disgust). Again, it wasn’t about rich and poor, or powerful and powerless, but about those who were producers as opposed to those who were moochers. Many moochers were rich in the book, and many producers were poor. Galt himself was poor as a church mouse and worked as a track walker in his real world life, only going to his gulch for 2 weeks a year for vacation.
Actually, one of the guys they recruited was a banker, and one was a judge (I don’t recall any lawyers :p). As to what they produce, well, I don’t think we shall get into that. First, it’s a hijack (and obviously a throw away line on your part anyway), and second…what would be the point?
The point is that “producers”, even when contrasted with “moochers”, is meaningless. A banker is totally a moocher, he loans money, he gets more money back, which he loans again. Its the money that is doing the work, he is just there to service the money. He “produces” D for diddly squat.
Its Calvinist hogwash, to imply that them what’s got got it because they deserve it, and them that don’t, don’t.
I’d say that the point is that those are your own prejudices speaking, have nothing to do with the book (that you obviously didn’t read), and are outside of the context of this discussion. Feel free to start a GD thread on the subject of how bankers are worthless moochers that produce nothing if you like, 'luci.
Algher, XT, **Claverhouse **plus anybody I missed who replied to me – Thanks for playing along! I *said *it was a hijack, so I don’t think it’s fair to the thread to drag it out and I’ll stop after this.
Clearly there are ways in which pure free enterprise could – might – perhaps – actually fill all of the trash hauling needs of the community. XT, I’m very familiar with the patchwork of rural systems used in various places across the US such as what you describe (not claiming knowledge of offshore trash hauling 
). Some places, what you describe seems to work; other places turn into shitholes. There are lots of other societal needs, which suffer from similar problems when left exclusively to the hand of the marketplace.
I was intrigued with Rand’s vision when I read it way back when. I wasn’t convinced though, and wondered what happened to those who fell through the cracks. I still see the cracks in her meritocracy, or libertopia, or whatever we call it as we look back on it now from a distance. And so I thought it might be fun to bring up those same cracks here.
It isn’t necessary to defend the choices made by the author of a work of fiction, in this instance or any other. But to those who saw the Gulch as an actually workable society, or those who think it representative of a world view to be striven for today, I simply offer the reminder that it was, is, and always will be a work of fiction. And the cracks still show.
Did she ever even try?
Emphasis added.
Really? He doesn’t need to differentiate good loans from bad loans? I could do that all day-- loan out money regardless of the quality of the loans and always get more money back. Sheesh, it’s no wonder everyone doesn’t do this-- it’s like an economic perpetual motion machine!! One would almost think it was too good to be true…
I think Rand was more concerned with the tastiness of puppies. [rimshot]