Saving the Competent

It wasn’t surprising to me to finally come to see that all the vanished industrialists were together living in a sort of elite society excluded from the rest of the looter world. It took me a while but I think I’ve finally understood that the point of this book is to show that there will always be people that do great things and people who try to benefit off of those successful people without having to move a muscle. Those people like Jim, Wesley, and Orren have the capacity to grow only as long as the other innovators and business leaders such as d’Anconia and Wyatt grow as well, they’re like parasites that infect the competent man’s success, take a chunk of it for themselves, and then excuse their indecency by proclaiming it was done for the “social welfare.” It’s evident that without these men, the world would stop going forward and may even start taking steps back without these men, and that’s what the segregated society in Colorado was meant to prove; the economy broke down without men like these to keep it running, and so government was left with no choice but to put a complete pause in it and hope that new competent industrialists would come out of the blue so they can start to feed off of them. This is ironic because the Directive 10-289 completely freezes society and any minds that kept it going. This part of the book reminded me of the movie The Town in such a way that the people that moved away from society in the movie thought society was harming them and that it would be more beneficial for them to live away from the modern world, and that’s what the great industrialists like Galt are trying to do. They are trying to get away from the people who have held them back with restrictions and limitations their whole life. They are trying to leave them behind and make them realize that without their minds, the world has no way to move forward and will end up breaking down. I see Taggart Transcontinental as a sign for the world, it fails more and more every time another industrialist leaves, and it is connected to every one of them one way or another. This can also be frustrating to read because Dagny keeps trying to save exactly what she might end up destroying soon.