“You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others – that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler- that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.
(…) In order to deprive us of honor, that you may then deprive us of our wealth, you have always regarded us as slaves who deserve no moral recognition. You praise any venture that claims to be non-profit, and damn the men who made the profits that make the venture possible. You regard as “in the public interest” any project serving those who do not pay; it is not in the public interest to provide any services for those who do the paying. “Public benefit” is anything given as alms; to engage in trade is to injure the public. “Public welfare” is the welfare of those who do not earn it; those who do, are entitled to no welfare. “The public”, to you, is whoever has failed to achieve any virtue or value; whoever achieves it, whoever provides the goods you require for survival, ceases to be regarded as part of the public or as part of the human race.
What blank-out permitted you to hope that you could get away with this muck of contradictions and to plan it as an ideal society, when the “No” of your victims was sufficient to demolish the whole of your structure? What permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to plead for help in the tone of a threat? You cry, as he does, that you are counting on our pity, but your secret hope is the moral code that has taught you to count on our guilt. You expect us to feel guilty of our virtues in the presence of your vices, wounds and failures –guilty of succeeding at existence, guilty of enjoying the life that you damn, yet beg us to help you to live.
(…) Look past the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete with men of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of voluntary trade. What determines the material value of your work? Nothing but the productive effort of your mind –if you lived on a desert island. The less efficient the thinking of your brain, the less your physical labor would bring you- and you could spend your life on a single routine, collecting a precarious harvest or hunting with bows and arrows, unable to think any further. But when you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.
When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend the time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.
(…) Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing, but it’s only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to range of the moment. The man who does no more that physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor –the man who discovers new knowledge- is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can’t be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers whatever labor they perform. It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further discoveries. This is a mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the mind are one; no matter the degree of intelligence, among men who desire to work and don’t seek or expect the unearned.
In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his jobs requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, let to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the “competition” between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of “exploitation” for which you have damned the strong.
(…) You did not care to compete in terms of intelligence – you are now competing in terms of brutality. You did not care to allow rewards to be won by successful production- you are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful plunder. You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value –you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public’s unspecified good. You had said that you saw no difference between the power of money and the power of guns –no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now. “
Ayn Rand, “Atlas shrugged”
"The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, let to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the “competition” between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of “exploitation” for which you have damned the strong."
ReplyDeleteAunque todo el escrito está increíble, creo que esa es de las partes que más me llamó la atención, el final no pudo haber sido mejor:
"You are learning the difference now."