No, Seriously. Who Is John Galt?

I’ve been wondering lately if my perception of economic realities is colored by a shift in the makeup of the persons running industry; whether once upon a time there were industrialists with great vision and now, those being few and far between, I make decisions as though there aren’t any.

Recently in California we voted to put a lot of public money into a high-speed rail to connect San Francisco with Los Angeles. I’m all for high-speed rail and I think that public transportation is generally a good thing, so I voted for it, and so did a bunch of other people. The proposition passed. I look forward to taking a trip on it when it gets built.

It did get me to thinking though, about how, given demand for a service, we turned to government rather than industry. There is no Dagny Taggart from Atlas Shrugged waiting to provide the best damn rail service anyone has ever seen and make a pile of money off of it. I don’t know if any businesses ever considered building a high-speed rail line between SF and LA, but I do understand that this isn’t the Nineteenth Century and the land between Saint Francis and the Angels isn’t selling for pennies an acre.

I recognize this as a left-wing brand of thinking: if something should be done, lets get government to do it. My right-wing conscience (thanks, Dad) nags at the back of my consciousness wondering if there wasn’t a business opportunity here and whether some genius industrialist could do the job better.

The thirty billion dollars this project will cost might well be prohibitive. It’s a huge risk for an individual to assume. There are only a handful of individuals that can even borrow that kind of money. So would it do any good for us to petition the Coca-Cola corporation or IBM to build a rail line? Should we trust that the wisdom of the market economy dictates that we don’t need a rail link between Northern and Southern California? That seems to be a defeatist attitude. From a practical standpoint, making this a public works project seems like the only way that this kind of progress will ever happen.

If the Captains of Industry cannot be counted upon to provide services for which we are willing to pay, is that because of a failure of entrepreneurial spirit? Dagny Taggart would have gotten the job done. Dagny Taggart would have had no shame in traveling to Washington by private jet (or private rail car, anyhow) but of course, she’d have some reason other than begging for public money to travel there. My question is then: were there ever Dagny Taggarts and Hank Reardens walking the Earth, or were they the product of Ayn Rand’s romantic imagination? Did no one like that ever exist in the first place? If they did exist, what happened to them?

Then I saw this: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/5957

Yes, I’ve had my criticisms of the Segway. It’s been overhyped, without a doubt. But I’ve always acknowledged that it’s a remarkable invention. It took a lot of a lot of different kinds of smarts to get that thing built, in production, and marketed. Now Dean Kamen is building prosthetic limbs better than any that came before, and drawing from such a variety of technologies to do it that one can only pause and marvel at the scope and impact of such a project. It was hype to say that the Segway would change everything about how we live, but fully-articulated force-feedback prosthetic limbs are a huge step toward addressing the fundamental fragility of human life. I am confident that in my lifetime, I will see people who have lost both hands writing with a fountain pen and peeling bananas. If that doesn’t change the whole game of human existence, I don’t know what would.

So perhaps this romantic ideal really does exist? Sadly, it seems that for every Dean Kamen there are a hundred Kenneth Lays, and for every Steve Jobs a thousand Robert Nardellis. So I don’t have any real answers about the nature of the leaders of industry in our world. What I do have is a small insight into the difference in perception between the right wing and the left that may go directly to the nature of the conflict of values we seem to have.

When the right wing talks about the wealthy, they’re talking about Dean Kamen, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs and okay, even Bill Gates. When the left wing talks about the wealthy, they’re talking about Jeffery Skilling and Kenneth Lay… and Paris Hilton. When the left says, “these people are leeches off the real workers,” the right says, “these are the driving force of progress in our world.”

How do you reconcile this? The real difficult truth here is that both are right, but they aren’t talking about the same thing. This is the debate that shapes our economy and determines our prosperity.