Read Online I Am John Galt by Donald Luskin, Andrew Greta - Free Book Online

mean?”
    To those who ask it, my answer is: “For the same reason that makes you afraid of it.” 21
    Allison, being a businessman first and a philosopher second—unlike Rand, who was a philosopher only—uses less provocative language, more eager to persuade than to rebuke. He talks about pride, self-esteem, and teamwork, but these are all tied together by the idea of self-interest, or “selfishness” if you insist.
    In the language of Rand’s hero John Galt, the idea is that “By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself and lives for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”
    This means that BB&T’s employees don’t exist to serve its shareholders, and its shareholders don’t exist to provide a living for its employees. Together, the shareholders and the employees don’t exist for Barney Frank to provide housing to people who can’t afford it. The shareholders and the employees, each individual among them, exists for his or her own sake.
    So when they come together as a team—the shareholders committing their capital and their risk, the employees committing their time—it is a voluntary arrangement to mutual gain. It’s Allison’s “trader principle.”
    When Galt says “by the grace of reality,” what he means is that no other arrangement is really possible. Any other arrangement, one in which people did not exist for their own sakes, would mean that someone was being made to do something against his or her will. Such arrangements are no better than (indeed no different than) “might makes right.” And in reality they are inescapably a formula for savagery.
    Arrangements not based on “selfishness”—that is, not based on pride and self-esteem—can only be based on some degree or form of slavery. “Selfishness” in Rand’s sense is a synonym for “self-determination,” for “freedom.”
    Applied to a business like BB&T, a business dedicated to attracting people who are unashamedly proud of themselves and possessed of great self-esteem, and interested in trading their skills with others like them, it’s a synonym for “success.”
    Do pride, self-esteem, and teamwork—people coming together for their own sakes—mean that it would be wrong to be charitable?
    Hardly. Allison and BB&T are big boosters of the United Way. Allison says it’s in his own self-interest: “I wouldn’t want to live in the kind of community that would exist if there weren’t a United Way.” 22 And he doesn’t think his own admitted self-interest makes his charity any less charitable. He says, “Because I believe it’s in my own self-interest, I give more, and I give more consistently.”
    At the same time, Allison is very clear that “charity is secondary.” He says, “Producing is more important than giving away, because you have to produce before you can give away.” 23
    He sees what extremely wealthy men like Microsoft founder Bill Gates (whom we meet in Chapter 5, “The Persecuted Titan”) and mega-investor Warren Buffett have done, giving away much of their great fortunes to charity—and in the case of Gates, devoting his considerable intellect to the administration of that charity. Allison says, “Gates’s great contribution was creating Microsoft, and the world is worse off that he’s not focusing on making Microsoft better. What if Thomas Edison had quit when he was Bill Gates’s age? What would we have lost?” 24
    We’ll see. Maybe Gates’s genius—and his money—really will solve some of the world’s problems. Allison is skeptical. “Because of comparative advantage, what he was special at was computers, not solving poverty in Africa, but maybe he’ll get lucky.” 25
    In Defense of