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

Capitalism
    After John Allison signed the document surrendering substantial control of BB&T to the whims of the federal government, after he put down the pen, after he rode down the elevator from the top floor of the tall black building in Winston-Salem and walked into the chilly November night—after he walked away from the world—where did he go, and what did he do?
    Rand’s hero John Galt, the man who walked away from the world, went to Galt’s Gulch, hidden in the mountains of Colorado, and recruited other great minds to join him on strike against the looters, the power seekers, and the altruists. Allison hasn’t exactly done that , but in his own affable Southern way, he’s done something almost as subversive.
    Instead of Galt’s mountain fastness, Allison can be found on Wake Forest University’s leafy campus, in a small office crammed with books by and about Ayn Rand, teaching courses in leadership and directing a growing campaign to teach the morality of capitalism in America’s colleges. Like Galt, he’s spreading the word.
    It started when he was still at BB&T. He recalls, “For years, banks have been big contributors to community projects. It’s kind of expected in the business, and it’s probably a legitimate part of the business, because a lot of our clients are involved in stuff and those kinds of things. . . . Our focus . . . has always been on education. So we were a pretty big contributor to universities.”
    Which makes BB&T no different than any other bank. But John Allison is very different from other bank CEOs—he’s a Randian. So when he asked himself, “What is the issue that maybe we could have a big impact on?” there was just one possible answer: “Capitalism.”
    Allison wasn’t interested in helping universities teach economics. He was interested in helping universities teach the morality of capitalism —the philosophy underlying it, and the reasons why it is the only way of arranging economic affairs that is consistent with human freedom.
    â€œThere’s really no economic argument against capitalism,” Allison says. “We’re just losing the ethical fight. . . . And ethics always trumps economics.” In other words, no matter what heights of wealth and advancement capitalism leads the world to, it seems there’s always somebody complaining about the brutality of its innate competitiveness or the unfairness of the inequality it produces. So the system that abolished slavery from the face of the earth and makes it possible for 7 billion souls to live on it is nevertheless always under political attack.
    â€œSo we’ve got to have an ethical fight,” decided Allison. “And of course, based on my beliefs, I said, well, we’ve got to get Rand into the fight.”
    But that wouldn’t be easy. Rand considered herself a serious philosopher, but she’s scarcely taught in university philosophy departments. Perhaps it’s because she chose to express her philosophy in accessible popular novels rather than in impenetrable textbooks. Or perhaps it’s because she has always been seen as a political conservative, something not exactly embraced by today’s liberal-dominated college faculties.
    â€œRand has obviously been consciously not included,” Allison claims. “Academics, they don’t want her in. They’re scared of her, in my opinion. She’s threatening.”
    So Allison decided to build an entirely new academic initiative for the advancement of the morality of capitalism, with Ayn Rand at its heart—just as decades earlier he had set out to build a banking empire the same way. “We started working with a number of universities,” he recalls. “Our first program was at Duke and we did something at Carolina. They’d agree to require Atlas Shrugged , and we’d say, okay. If they want to teach it and say it’s stupid,