Atlas Is Shrugging
Not Quite the Way Ayn Rand Envisioned in Her 1957 Dystopian Novel. Her Economic "Prime Movers" Turned Out to Be Truck Drivers and Others, Not Corporate Titans
A decade ago, as we were approaching President Barack Obama’s first congressional mid-term elections in 2010, Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” enjoyed a renaissance. A three-part movie ensued. Audiobooks and reprints of her tome became fashionable. “Who is John Galt?” bumper stickers found their way on vehicles.
Her best-selling book promoted her largely libertarian, anti-socialist, and humanist if not atheistic world view. Let’s consult Cliff’s Notes for a quick summary.
The story of Atlas Shrugged takes place in the United States at an unspecified future time. Dagny Taggart, vice president in charge of operations for Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, seeks to rebuild the crumbling track of the Rio Norte Line that serves Ellis Wyatt's oil fields and the booming industrial areas of Colorado. The country is in a downward economic spiral with businesses closing and men out of work. Other countries in the world have become socialist Peoples' States and are destitute. Colorado, based on Wyatt's innovative method of extracting oil from shale, is the last great industrial center on earth. Dagny intends to provide Colorado the train service it requires, but her brother James Taggart, president of Taggart Transcontinental, tries to block her from getting new rails from Rearden Steel, the last reliable steel manufacturer. James wants to do business with the inefficient Associated Steel, which is run by his friend Orren Boyle. Dagny wants the new rail to be made of Rearden Metal, a new alloy that Hank Rearden developed after ten years of experiment. Because the metal has never been tried and has been denounced by metallurgists, James won't accept responsibility for using it. Dagny, who studied engineering in college, has seen the results of Rearden's tests. She accepts the responsibility and orders the rails made of Rearden Metal.
Worsening the economic depression in the U.S. is the unexplained phenomenon of talented men retiring and disappearing. For example, Owen Kellogg, a bright young Taggart employee for whom Dagny had great hopes, tells her that he is leaving the railroad. McNamara, a contractor who was supposed to rebuild the Rio Norte Line, retires unexpectedly. As more great men disappear, the American people become increasingly pessimistic. Dagny dislikes the new phrase that has crept into the language and signifies people's sense of futility and despair. Nobody knows the origin or exact meaning of the question "Who is John Galt?," but people use the unanswerable question to express their sense of hopelessness. Dagny rejects the widespread pessimism and finds a new contractor for the Rio Norte Line.
Not to spoil the story, but our heroine, Dagny, literally crash lands her way to “Galt’s Gulch” (Ouray, Colorado, apparently was the inspiration) in search of the elusive and legendary John Galt (notably after a couple of romantic dalliances with two fellow entrepreneurs and economic “prime movers” or “men of the mind”). Desperate government officials, facing a financial collapse amidst disappearing corporate titans, launch a search for folk hero Galt. Of course, they find him, but that’s when the story gets a little weird.
What does this have to do with today? My friend, a former Senate leadership staffer, and Bush 43 White House aide, Doug Badger, writing for The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal outlines it:
Despite $9 trillion in fiscal and monetary stimulus from the federal government, America has an employment problem.
The Labor Department estimates that 10.4 million jobs remained unfilled in August, the most recent month for which figures are available, including 1.5 million in health care and social services. That same month, a record-high 4.3 million people quit their jobs.
The government reported that 3.1 million fewer people were working or seeking work last month than in February 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
While September saw employment increases in retail, hospitality, construction, and some other industries, employment in the health care sector continues to drop.
Hospital employment declined by 165,000 between February and May 2020. A year and a half later, with hospitals still facing pandemic-related strains, the sector has recovered fewer than half of those lost workers.
Nursing homes haven’t begun to reverse their staff losses, having shed 410,000 employees, or more than 12% of the industry workforce between February 2020 and September 2021.
The good news is that President Joe Biden has a plan.
The bad news is that his plan could result in the loss of millions of additional workers.
The percent of Americans in the workforce has plummeted since Badger’s White House days during the Bush 43 Administration from a high of 66% to around 61% today.
But it’s not because they can’t find work. True, some 10,000 baby boomers are retiring and going on Social Security and/or Medicare, on average, every day. It is also true that emergency extended unemployment benefits, which only recently ended, created a perverse incentive not to work well into the summer months, at least in many states. But the Millenial generation is actually larger as a whole than Boomers, so it is not actually due to a worker shortage.
Side note: Millenials trail boomers badly in wealth. That’s another story. No wonder so many Millenials are Bernie Sanders supporters and have fond views of socialism. That may change when they finally win their share of the economic pie after they ditch their gender studies degrees and overcome their woke educations.
But look no further than the enormous supply chain and logistics disruptions plaguing the economy. Onerous vaccine mandates were just the icing on the cake for many workers who have had enough of not only challenging work conditions but onerous federal and state government mandates. Wesley Mouch, call your office.
Take the trucking industry, which has been warning of trucker shortages for decades. The head of the American Trucking Association says there the industry is short 80,000 drivers and could grow to 160,000 by 2030. About 3.6 million truckers are employed today.
What about the 2 million illegal immigrants that have crossed our southern border during Biden’s “open borders” Administration. Maybe 80,000 of them can learn to drive trucks. Maybe our illustrious Transportation Secretary can get busy on that once he finishes his three months of paternity leave during a transportation crisis.
How big a deal is our trucker shortage? Consider that over 71 percent of freight tonnage in America is shipped by truck, 11.5 million tons in 2018. Add to that the pressure to reduce costs by companies while striving to keep up with costs of recruiting and retaining drivers and paying increasingly higher fuel costs (thanks, Joe Biden, for your early decisions to cancel oil and gas leases on federal lands and terminating the KXL Pipeline to Canada). Fuel prices have risen more than 40% for most consumers since Biden took office. It is increasingly hard for smaller trucking companies and especially independent truckers to remain in business.
Over half the cost of shipping is caught up in driver salaries and benefits and fuel costs. Never mind maintenance, insurance, cost of leases, etc. Adding fuel to the fire are electronic logging devices on trucks that track every movement.
Some may ask, what about trains? Trains are great and cost-efficient, but most manufacturing plants and warehouses don’t have rail lines leading up to their loading docks. Also, rail is great for cross-country shipping but less so between some cities, and even less so between manufacturers and retailers. You also have to get products onboard the rail cars, and that usually involves a truck (and several other people).
In recent years, regulators have imposed “Hours of Service” limits on truckers - no more driving than 60 hours in a 7-day week, with a mandatory 34-hour rest period immediately afterward. But Congress won’t budge on allowing heavier and safer trucks that would help ease the driver shortage. The US has among the lowest interstate truck weight limits in the world at 80,000 pounds per vehicle. Europe’s limit is 96,000 pounds, and both Canada and Mexico feature limits in excess of 100,000 pounds.
Shippers have long proposed allowing truck weight limits to increase upwards of 91,000 pounds with the addition of a sixth axle on trucks, which would not only increase their braking power, making them safer but distribute weight more efficiently, reducing wear and tear on roads and bridges.
Guess who fought that? The rail industry, so-called “safety” advocates and their lackeys in Congress, led by former Republican US Rep. and current Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Lou Barletta. You can do much better, Pennsylvania Republicans. Pick a better candidate. You have several terrific alternatives. Barletta deserves his share of the blame for today’s supply chain challenges. Imagine this kind of bought-and-paid-for judgment at work as your governor. Mio Dio.
Speaking of independent contractors, state laws vary on who qualifies as an “employee” or an “independent contractor.” California recently passed legislation (AB 5) that strictly limits independent contractors. Why? It is easier for unions to recruit and mobilize employees. Truckers in California are affected.
Adding further insult to injury is California’s so-called “climate change” agenda that prohibits trucks more than 3 years old from frequenting our nation’s largest west coast ports in that state over concerns of “pollution.”
Add all this up, and it’s no wonder our ports are clogged with containers with hundreds of ships waiting offshore to be unloaded. Never mind the ports’ own problems with staffing.
And we have the government to thank, both states like California but especially our recalcitrant federal government.
People are fed up. Workers have had enough of government stupidity. If they can escape the workforce, they will. The mask mandate madness may be the tipping point.
Atlas, at long last, is shrugging. Can you blame him?