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

that’s fine. I’ll let the students read it and make their own judgments.”
    Building an education revolution takes time, just like building a bank did. “We’re now up to 60 programs,” Allison says, beaming. “Almost all of the major universities in our footprint now, and lots of other colleges and universities. . . . And I get really positive feedback about this. I have talked to numerous students who have said, ‘Man, this course changed my whole worldview, and I am a better human being for it.’”
    John Allison also has a long list of Randian recommendations for repairing the American economy in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis that nearly destroyed it.
    He’d like to see the Federal Reserve stripped of its limitless powers to print money, and return to an objective standard of monetary value such as gold. He’d like to see the tax code transformed so that consumption, not investment, is taxed. He’d like to see Social Security, Medicare, and education privatized. He’d like to see immigration liberalized so that the best and the brightest can come to the United States. He’d like to see banks given more stringent capital requirements, and have them return to more traditional forms of mortgage lending. 26
    Most important, he wants to change the culture. He wants the attacks on capitalism to stop, for capitalism to be embraced as the most effective and the most moral system of economic organization. And it’s to that most important objective that he’s devoting his attention now, through his sponsorship of university programs on the morality of capitalism.
    Can he win? Can capitalism win? Can Ayn Rand’s ideas win? At least for Allison, they’re winning the war on the home front. He says, “My son read a lot of Objectivist stuff, seemed to agree with it, went away to college, and became very down on Objectivism. Then he graduated from college and took a couple months after he graduated, reread all the stuff, and said, ‘Wow!’ He said, ‘You know, Rand’s right.’”
    So perhaps there’s hope. Maybe someday Allison will return from academia to the world and, like John Galt, raise his hand over the desolate earth and trace in space the sign of the dollar.

Chapter 7
    The Capitalist Champion
    T. J. Rodgers as Francisco d’Anconia, the modern Renaissance man and agent provocateur for capitalism
    Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: “I can do it better than you,” but simply: “I can do it.” What he meant by doing was doing superlatively.
    â€”Atlas Shrugged
    Who is Francisco d’Anconia?
    In Atlas Shrugged , Francisco d’Anconia is one of John Galt’s inner circle in organizing the “mind on strike”—persuading men of ability to walk away from an immoral collectivist economic and political system, thus hastening its collapse.
    D’Anconia is one of the world’s wealthiest men, heir to a South American copper-mining business. From childhood he shows extraordinary ability in everything he undertakes, from athletics to academics to business. His ambition is to be worthy of his inheritance by expanding the already enormous d’Anconia Copper empire.
    But when Galt persuades d’Anconia to help him with his strike, d’Anconia acts as an intellectual provocateur—brilliantly skewering collectivist politicians and businessmen, and inspiring beleaguered industrialists. In attempting to recruit the nation’s leading steel executive for Galt’s strike, d’Anconia delivers at a cocktail party an impromptu treatise on the meaning and morality of money that is Rand’s most sparklingly compelling writing on the virtues of capitalism.
    â€œIs this the headquarters of a