I Am John Galt

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Luskin, Donald L.

I am John Galt : today's heroic innovators building the world and the villainous parasites destroying it / Donald L. Luskin and Andrew Greta.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-01378-6 (hardback); 978-1-118-10096-7 (ebk.); 978-1-118-10097-4 (ebk.); 978-1-118-10098-1 (ebk.)

1. EntrepreneurshipâBiography. 2. Creative ability in business. 3. Self-esteem.

I. Greta, Andrew. II. Title.

HC29.L87 2011

338'.040922âdc22

2011010991

To Christine, Roark, and Roark

âDon

To my wife Emily, and daughter Lucy

âAndrew

Introduction

Who is John Galt? Ayn Rand asked that question over and over as a catchphrase in
Atlas Shrugged
, one of the best-selling and most inspiring novels of all time. The question was a cry of despair in a desperate time not unlike our ownâthe equivalent of “What's the use?” More precisely, it meant “Where are the great men and women who could inspire us?” That's a question many are asking today. The world portrayed in
Atlas Shrugged
is racked by a pervasive economic and social crisisâits eerie similarity to our own real world today is one of the reasons it is selling more copies than ever, 50 years after it was first published.

Your personal answer to Rand's question could be “
I
am John Galt.” Yes,
you
, the person reading these words now in an increasingly quaint hard copy, or on your handheld digital reading device.
You
can be one of the epic heroes of Rand's booksâlike John Galt himself, her greatest heroâthe ones who fight despair, overcome relentless opposition, and lift the world out of desperation.

We think that's the real secret explaining why Rand's fictionâ
Atlas Shrugged
(1957), but also
The Fountainhead
(1943),
We the Living
(1936), and
Anthem
(1938)âare so timeless. Simply stated: they are inspiring. Rand set out to portray ideal men and women, and she did. The heroes and heroines of her novels are individualists, innovators, and iconoclasts. They are achieversâin business, in the arts, and in love. Their ordeals are the ones that all potentially great people face. What's special about them is that in the course of Rand's novels, they discover and put to work core philosophiesâlife strategies, reallyâthat lead ultimately to triumph.

You can do it, too. Our proof is the heroes we portray in this book. They faced all the same challenges you do. And yet they made themselves great by following the same life strategies that Rand's heroes didâsome of them quite self-consciously, others without having ever even heard of Rand as far as we know. This book shows you what their life strategiesâtheir philosophiesâare, and how they map with great precision to the philosophies of Rand's heroes.

Yes, the world portrayed in Rand's books was the world of the industrial eraâwhen leading-edge technologies were railroads and steel mills. Today's Randian heroes run software companies, not railroads. They manufacture semiconductors, not steel. But the principles of success are the same. The philosophy is the same, and Rand laid it all out more than 50 years ago.

Unfortunately, Rand's villains are alive and well in today's world, too. We portray them here as proof that collectivism, self-abnegation, envy, power lust, and, most tellingly, the corrupt alliance of business and government are all strategies for personal ruin. And they spill over into horrific consequences for the world. As you'll see, the economic paroxysm that rocked the world late in the first decade of the 2000s was caused specifically by individuals operating perfectly in the mode of Rand's parasitic villains.

So as another timeless book puts it, our real world and Rand's fictional world are both the best of times and the worst of times. Our heroes have created personal wealth never before seen in history by creating technological marvels that were thought, just a few years ago, to be impossibilities found only in science fiction. Our villains very nearly succeeded in bringing the world economy to its knees. Such is the power of one's personal philosophy. Such is the power of your choice.

Whom do you choose to be like? Do you want to be like Bill Gates? Gates is reviled as a monopolist and a plutocrat akin to Rand's hero Henry Rearden, the steel tycoon. His own government came within inches of branding him a criminal and breaking up his company. If you agree he's a hero, you need to read this book to learn what he did to became one. If you think he's a villain, you
urgently
need to read this bookâwe'll show you that his greatness is to be celebrated, not feared. Do you want to be like Steve Jobs? He dropped out of school to follow his professional passion like Rand's hero Howard Roark. Even after he became rich and famous, over and over again Jobs risked his fortune on new and untried technologiesâjust because he thought they were so damn cool. Now his company is one of the most valuable on the planet. Yet he's widely regarded as a pirate who steals the ideas of others, and an autocratic son of a bitch entirely incapable of working with people. If you agree that he's a hero, maybe one of the reasons is that you're reading this on an iPadâone of Jobs's many magical innovations that have transformed our culture. If you think he's a villain, go out and get an iPadâit might change your mind.

Maybe you'd like to be Paul Krugman. He's a media darling and widely known academic much like Rand's villain Ellsworth Toohey. He's also a rabid partisan who, in the vivid words of one critic, pulls his so-called facts from “a database somewhere in his lower intestine.”
1
He has discredited himself among serious thinkers and brought dishonor to the once-great newspaper on whose opinion pages his politicized deceptions appear. He's also a socialist who is willing to destroy as many lives as necessary to deliver the United States into collectivism. If you've experienced a visceral revulsion when reading a Krugman column or seeing him on the Sunday morning talk shows, we'll help you understand your intuition that he is a villain. If he's a hero in your mind, then you shouldn't be afraid to read what we have to say about himâbut we might change your mind.

Does all this strike you as a strange conception of “heroes” and “villains”? Maybe when you think of a hero, you think of someone like “Sully”âChesley Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who saved 155 passengers by successfully landing a disabled plan in the Hudson River. Sully isn't a titan of business. He's not rich. Yet we emphatically believe he is a hero, and we suspect Ayn Rand would, too. Why? Because Sully's performance in those fateful few minutes in January 2009 was a tour de force of sheer ability, the bravura performance of a highly skilled and courageous man motivated by a single purpose, doing battle with chaosâand winning. What Sully has in common with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the other heroes we talk about in this book is competence, courage, and purpose.
That's
what makes a hero.

Maybe when you think of a villain (and let's leave out overt monsters like, say, Adolf Hitler) you think of a corrupt politician like Richard Nixon or a crook like Bernard Madoff. Who could disagree with that? Ayn Rand certainly demonstrated that evil could exist at the highest levels of government and in business as well. We'll meet real-world villains of both types in this book. But Rand's novels focused primarily on that special brand of evil that is carried out under the high-minded slogans of altruism. The real-world villains you'll meet in this book all have one thing in common: No matter how rabid their lust for power, no matter how voracious their appetite for unearned wealth, and no matter how many lives they have to destroy in the process, their villainy is all carried out in the name of selfless service to others.

Real-life Randian heroes and villains are among us. If you so choose, you can live your life such that you can truly say, “I am John Galt.” This book shows you how.

The Books That Changed Our World

To Ayn Rand fans, her books, characters, and philosophy need no introduction. If you are new to Rand, let us introduce her.

Ayn Rand is one of the best-selling novelists of all time.
Atlas Shrugged
has sold over 7 million copies since its 1957 publication, with a record 500,000 copies in 2009 alone. Of the Modern Library Reader's List of 100 Best Novels, Rand's titles hold four of the top eight positions, with
Atlas Shrugged
at #1 and
The Fountainhead
at #2.
2
In a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, respondents ranked
Atlas Shrugged
second only to the Bible when asked what book had made the biggest impact on their lives.
3

The
New York Times
has called
Atlas Shrugged
“one of the most influential business books ever written.” The
Chicago Tribune
called it “the boldest affirmation of the gospel of free enterprise ever attempted in fiction.”
4
Its ongoing popularity is an astonishing achievement for a literary franchise that has produced no new content since Rand's death in 1982, and for a book that was derided as too long, too intellectual, and too politically conservative.

References to Rand's work continually crop up in popular culture ranging from
Mad Men
to
Mad
magazine. There's even a video game saturated with Rand references, including cigarettes branded with gold dollar signs and the ever-present question, “Who is Atlas?”

But Rand has something deeper to offer. Her books are sought out for their enduring practical and philosophical content by readers eager to learn how to live a more successful life. Rand's work has inspired lives and helped create the society, politics, economics, law, and culture we live in today.

Former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan and the eminent economist Milton Friedman (both of whom we'll examine in detail in this book), as well as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan all count themselves among Rand's devotees. It's far more than just conservative political figures, though. Whole Foods Market founder John Mackey, former BB&T chief executive John Allison (whom we'll also examine), Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, baseball's “Iron Man” Cal Ripken, actor Vince Vaughn, magician Penn Jillette, actress Angelina Jolie, and even Hillary Clinton have all said publicly that Rand has been an inspiration.

Beyond Political Labels

Do you have to be a political conservative to be a real-life Ayn Rand hero? Hardly! Rand used the word
conservative
as an insult. But then again, she did the same thing with the word
liberal
. When it came to politics, she was maddeningly hard to pin downâand very resistant to being labeled.

That said, she is probably associated more with so-called conservative ideas than with so-called liberal ones. And with
Atlas Shrugged
selling better than ever, the political right has been quick to claim that it's because of politics. The right's story is that the Great Recession that rocked the globe in 2008 and 2009 was caused entirely by government meddling in the economy, and that Ayn Rand's masterwork amounts to a prediction of that, made more than a half century ago.

This is a misreading of Rand, and the political left should be the first to say so. In fact, Rand has always offered as much to liberals as she has to conservatives.

For starters, it's much too simple to say that
Atlas Shrugged
is a parable of the destructive effects of government intervention, a black-and-white world in which businesspeople are heroes and public servants are villains. In fact, the primary villain in
Atlas Shrugged
is a businessman, railroad executive James Taggart. There are villainous politicians, to be sure, but for the most part they are portrayed as passive bumblers. The government's most destructive acts are carried out at the behest of Taggart and his cronies, not for ideological motives.

Yes, many of the heroes of
Atlas Shrugged
are businessmen. But that is only to say that the key dynamic animating the story's action is the conflict between good businessmen and bad businessmen.

Even the heroic businessmen in
Atlas Shrugged
are portrayed as flawed and conflicted individuals. They are not examples of “an ideal man,” the projection of which was for Rand the “motive and the purpose of my writing.”
5
That honor belongs to John Galt, a humble inventor. (Liberals take note: In
Atlas Shrugged
Galt invents a motor that requires no energyâwhat would now be called green technology.)

The same distinction shows up with a vengeance in
The Fountainhead
, Rand's first major novel. The ideal man is Howard Roark, an art-for-art's-sake architect. Ultrarich newspaper tycoon Gail Wynand is portrayed in heroic terms, prefiguring some of the industrial giants who will later populate
Atlas Shrugged
. But Wynand is a tragic hero who makes the error of pursuing wealth for the sake of power over other peopleâas in fact many highly achieved businesspeople do. In the closing scenes of the book Wynand commits suicide, declaring his entire life to have been a failure.

It's ironic to see the political right overlooking these realities in order to embrace Rand. Until now conservatives have despised her. So if my enemy's enemy is my friend, then Rand is a friend to liberals.

Rand was a militant atheist, and that has always been an irreconcilable difference with the conservative movement, given its coalition with the Christian church. Rand never even tried to be conciliatory on the subject. When she first met William F. Buckley Jr., the founding father of modern conservatism and a devout Catholic, she reportedly proclaimed in her heavy Russian accent, “Mr. Buckley, you arrrr too intelligent to believe in Gott!”
6

Buckley himself used to repeat that story, and denied any animosity about Rand's atheism. But when it came time in 1957 for Buckley's highly influential conservative magazine
National Review
to review the newly published
Atlas Shrugged
, it was worse than a panâit was a smear. The review was by conservative icon Whittaker Chambers, the ardent anticommunistâwho also happens to have been an ardent Christian.

Chambers portrayed
Atlas Shrugged
as a call for totalitarianism by big business, with “the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross.”
7
To anyone who had read the book, such an idea was preposterous to the point of slander. But reviews are intended for people who haven't read the book. This review was intended so that no conservative ever would. It didn't quite work
that
well, but it set the tone for half a century for how conservatives would regard the ideas of Ayn Rand.

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