The Prevailing Disrespect for Entrepreneurs

[WriterGal]

Hello Fellow-Admirers of Atlas Shrugged. the Novel,

I'm a simple woman, really, not a great intellectual. But I'd like to point out what I see as a great thorn in America's side, and that is the disrespect the average working person has for entrepreneurs and small business. I live in southern California and everyone I know works for the government. They never give a thought to the businesspeople who pay the taxes that pay for their salaries. In my opinion, we really need to get a simple message out, devoid of complicated philosophy, that paints small business as a "friend of the people' and that draws a direct line between entrepreneurship and a thriving community. It seems to me that people equate a strong government with a thriving community, and that's where all the trouble in present-day California lies. Strong government that hamstrings business equals weaker community. I'd love to work on an ad campaign that gets this message or a similar message out. We also have to make a distinction between Capitalism and Crony Capitalism that now infests Washington. The more average people can absorb these concepts, the better our country will be. Thoughts?

Best regards,

WriterGal

[Selene]

Welcome to OL Elayne:

You have to look on the bright side, you will be able to take high speed rail from your home to the government unemployment job processing center when the real collapse occurs in California.

Your deficit is what...about $25,000,000,000.00 or $26,000,000,000.00, but Governor Moonbeam took those pesky cell phones away from the state employees.

No there is a real cost cutter!

You make good points. Have you seen the movie?

Adam

[WriterGal]

Hello and thank you for your warm and humorous welcome. Yes, i saw the movie on Saturday at a 4:45pm show in la Palma, a suburb of Long Beach. The theatre was 3/4 full, which I took as a good sign. I thought Taylor Schilling was fabulous and the production value was high. However, the cut looked as though some interference had come in at the final hour and screwed with the story. Just my intuition. The opening was confusing and the shots of the train were very dark--or else we had a bad print. HOWEVER, that being said, I'll go again to watch it. All the actors were fabulous (except for Dagny's assistant, who seemed made of wood). But hey, I was so thrilled to see businesspeople positively represented, that I'll go pay to see it again.

WriterGal

[Selene]

Glad you enjoyed it.

I thought it was exquisite. Many of us have been waiting a long time for this event. Additionally, I expect it to be a catalyst for the political and economic crisis we are in the throes of.

Are you a writer, Writer Gal?

How did you find Ayn?

Adam

[WriterGal]

Hi Adam, I hope I'm doing this right. I just hit "Reply." I desperately hope you are correct about the movie serving as a catalyst. But we need to get the message out simply, in the sound bytes that people abosorb today. "Byte" messages that will send them to finding more about Ayn in more depth. We need to augment the movie and the novel's message. I have always been a writer and an entrepreneur. I found Ayn two years ago when I finally ordered "Atlas Shrugged" used, from Amazon! Finally, what i've known and believed in as far as the self-starting individual in business was articulated and dramatized by the AS novel.

WriterGal

Glad you enjoyed it.

I thought it was exquisite. Many of us have been waiting a long time for this event. Additionally, I expect it to be a catalyst for the political and economic crisis we are in the throes of.

Are you a writer, Writer Gal?

How did you find Ayn?

Adam

[Philip Coates]

> I'd love to work on an ad campaign that gets this message or a similar message out.

I'd say Ground Zero right now for the battle for freedom is getting people to see the movie and triumph over the "liberal blockade".

They desperately do not want all three parts of Atlas Shrugged to be made. Or people to flock out afterwards and buy the book.

That's where the battle is right now middle of April and into this summer. It's so enormous an issue that it should be the -only- priority until that battle is won.

[WriterGal]

Well, the peeps in Long Beach turned out and spent their money. But people can't see the movie without distribution. it wasn't even playing in Los Angeles proper except downtown. Nowhere in Beverly Hills or west LA.

[WriterGal]

Hey I have a question. Are there any meet-up groups in the LA/OC area? Can you direct me? Any Randians that get together for coffee and a klatch?

[Selene]

Are you a technical writer?

Fiction?

Both?

[WriterGal]

I write anything that pays! But mostly medical advertising, medical articles for kidney dialysis and food plans. I am also a fiction writer and editor under other names.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Elayne,

Welcome to OL.

You sound like a person who is going to enjoy this place and I hope you do.

I'm glad to see another writer showing up. We're starting to get a nice little community of writers around here.

Michael

[Selene]

I write anything that pays! But mostly medical advertising, medical articles for kidney dialysis and food plans. I am also a fiction writer and editor under other names.

Fascinating. When I was sixteen, I worked in the Animal Medical Center in NY City with a Dr. Armand Crescenzi on a membrane oxygenator for an artificial heart lung kidney dialysis machine. It was 1962-1963 and when I was finished work, I went downtown to NBI and watched Ayn and Nathaniel and Barbara give their talks.

[WriterGal]

That must have been fascinating and a very are treat. Well, I'm going to move on in my quest to find a meet-up group in SoCal. if you know of a contact person out here please let me know, Wishing you a good evening...

[IamBalSimon]

Hi Elayne and everyone...

Interesting comments and of course most anyone with affection for Atlas would agree with you.

Let me add a twist to this, which I believe Rand also got to, but did not emphasize enough, IMO. But she was telling a magnificent story - NOT publishing a manifesto and strategy guide, yes?

The twist emerges as an application of something I once read by the epistemologist, Gregory Bateson in his magnificent work, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. (Sorry - I can't cite the exact reference. It's late at night, his book is long, and it's been years since I read it thoroughly.) As I remember it, Bateson pointed out that we humans are faced with a constraint: namely that we cannot see around the bends (the arcs) in our lives. I would add that very few of us pay attention to the wakes that we leave behind us (I know that I CANNOT for very long, so for example, as I blithely drive through traffic, I have no way of knowing how many chains of events I set up for accidents or happy coincidences "behind me.")

The wake I leave behind is an arc beyond which I cannot easily see. There are other arcs as well that are so easy to ignore. Some easy examples:

- I put on my clothes in the morning - and completely ignore the fact that I owe a debt of gratitude to the people who made the clothes, and that they would not have done so had there not been a person behind them to design the clothes, and s/he would not have designed the clothes if she'd had to work 12 hours a day gathering or hunting for food. I ignore all of that.

- I go to my doctor and he tells me that I need a new medication. That medication emerges not from a "John Galt" olympian mind, but from man-decades of painstaking research according to accepted best-practice methodologies, that come from man-decades of trial-error-learning arcs, that also depend on not having to gather or hunt for food a good chunk of the day.

Business people ARE INDEED a tremendous resource for any society, but no business survives without customers, and there are no customers, generally speaking, without marketers - and in many cases, sales reps. And thus we have need for the fields of persuasion in the battlefields of business competition. All the raw materials of most businesses are not home grown by that business. And, of course, Rand certainly acknowledged this in Atlas Shrugged.

To tell her story, Rand focused on the near-perfect characters of Galt, Rearden, D'anconia and Taggert. But they all relied on the work products of the non-herculean models of people too. Scenes where John Galt and Eddie Willers are sitting in a coffee shop talking... The coffee shop forms the unnoticed backdrop, presumably run by a business, and served by a decent enough person who makes the lives of those who frequent the shop a bit easier. (I have a great fondness for coffee shops!)

The point is that everyone who adds value in our society owes a "thank you" to each other person who adds value. This thank you is usually done with money, but it would be nice to hear the words now and then too.

I think that is one of my "complaints" about the parasite class: not only do they take my money by force (government), but I never ever hear the words, "Thank you (for making it possible for me to survive without adding value)."

Of course, if this is the worst that I have to deal with, I'm doing mighty fine indeed. And so, indeed, I am.

- Bal

[Reidy]

Glad you could join us. You said Atlas Shrugged Part 1 isn't playing in Los Angeles. In fact it's at the Regent in Westwood.

[syrakusos]

... the disrespect the average working person has for entrepreneurs and small business.

I am reading The Invention of Enterprise edited by Landes, Mokyr, and Baumol (Princeton, 2010). In the chapter, "Entrepreneurship in the United States 1865-1920," Naomi R. Lamoreaux points out that in that era, enterprise was considered more than a worthy career and that those who sought mere employment were thought lacking in character. Of course, that is a generalization, as many people of that time (as now) held a different opinion of "robber barons." I believe that the change in general views came from the public schools. Teachers are paid from taxes, first, and then not paid by performance. Simple weeding apart from any grand conspiracy brought us to where we are today. After three or four generations, even the people attracted to "business" are not entrepreneurs but corporatists and rent-seekers.

This TED Lecture from Cameron Herold speaks of his childhood experiences in entrepreneurship.

... we really need to get a simple message out, devoid of complicated philosophy, that paints small business as a "friend of the people' and that draws a direct line between entrepreneurship and a thriving community.

There is a lot to all of that, "simple" though it may be. As you know, the primary justification for entrepreneurship is selfish: it is your innate right as a volitional being to offer exchanges of value to others and that derives from more consequential consideration of how you would survive without anyone else around. Your benefit to your community is secondary. Your fine product or service might be of no use whatever to all but a few people - though I have two baseball gloves, I never owned a hockey stick; I never had my nails done.

The benefit to the "community," secondary though it may be, is worth the effort of advertising. Business takes a defensive posture. I cannot imagine a Chamber of Commerce pushing a positive campaign. Certainly, except for Atlas Shrugged, and a few others perhaps, portrayals of positive images just are not there. We have crime dramas, but no business dramas, certainly none where enterprises and their creators are positive projections.

One point about the social aspect that I have heard as a pivot to explain what makes America great is that after every exchange, both buyer and seller say "Thank you." We take that for granted, a mere social nicety, but it speaks volumes. It had to be taught in Eastern Europe. I have materials here from both the government of Hong Kong and private sources on the difference in culture created by McDonald's which taught clerks to smile and be nice - and customers to stand in line. Funny thing about that for all the collectivist confucianism, Asians shove to get ahead. I have seen it here in Ann Arbor where we are 25% Asian. Americans don't push each because of the inherent individualism first of respect, but also fear of retaliation because no one accepts being pushed. It is a minor point, perhaps, but one thread in a complex social tapestry. We have too much "cloth" woven on a collectivist "loom."

[anthony]

Michael,

As the "buyer" here, I say thank you for a thoughtful post.

Good topic.

Tony

Edited April 19, 2011 by whYNOT

[Selene]

Batesman's Wiki

Amazon Link to Steps to an Ecology of Mind

[IamBalSimon]

Michael, you wrote: "We have crime dramas, but no business dramas, certainly none where enterprises and their creators are positive projections."

Generally speaking, this is correct. However there are a few TV shows that are worth mentioning:

- The biggest surprise for me is an anime show called "Spice and Wolf" which not only shows a favorable view toward business, but goes into some detail about the why's of it. I would not call it realistic. It is a cartoon, after all, and a fantasy as well, what with magic and all. And it is set in an agrarian society that looks to be about the 16th or 17th century. But the "art of business" is one of the central arcs of the show.

- There is a reality TV show that my wife likes called "Pawn Wars," which shows the buying end of a pawn shop located in Las Vegas. To my knowledge, they never show the selling effort by the pawn shop owner. I guessing because that would be revealing "tricks of the trade" to his competition.

But you are generally correct - business people are generally considered as props in most TV shows, and if they become central, they are evil or at least unfeeling, and generally with respect to some social issue like minority rights or environmentalism. I can't think of a single TV show or movie (other than the two above) that even approach a positive view of the business, let alone one that includes a detailed exploration of it.

I do have to take a slight issue with you when you wrote about the benefit to society is a secondary desire of the entrepreneur. I would suggest that this is where "the virtue of selfishness" could use a little bit of work in its explication.

When I have been a salesman or a tech writer working within a company, there is an immediate focus AT THE TIME OF THE DEAL: and that focus is to provide for myself and my family. I think most people understand the logic of this, and the way I have stated it would not threaten anyone other than the parasite class.

But notice my choice of words: "immediate focus." Not "primary value."

My focus tightens at the time of the deal because it has to. I have to concentrate on the terms of the deal; on the person with whom I am contracting; and on making sure that I get the best deal I can (without overreaching, sharp practices or fraud).

Once I have secured the deal, however, my focus can soften and other "values" become primary for me. Granted, they would cease to be primary were I not getting paid or if the contract, for whatever reason, ended.

Bear with me a little more so I can provide a short example: In April 2001, I started work as a contractor, providing tech writing at a major aerospace corporation. I loved the job. I liked the people I worked with and for. I liked upper management so far as I could understand the people in it. And they liked me (you'll see why I say this, shortly). Then we had the atrocities of 911. Immediately, almost every company in the aerospace industry was dealt an economic blow to the gut. Sales were put on hold. Inventory couldn't be gotten rid of. And the company I worked at started hemorrhaging money because it still had bills to pay, chief among them, labor costs. A decision was made within hours by upper management: all contractors would be sacked within 2 weeks. I faced my curtain call.

At that time, my primary concern wasn't about the deal anymore. My primary concern shifted to the well-being of America. I vividly remember walking through the company hallways whisper-whistling Greenwood's "Proud to be an American." I remember contributing to the Red Cross, even though I didn't have the money, and knew that I and my family would be facing some very challenging times. Why? How does "selfishness" explain this? Answer: because it is "selfish" to love America. And you take care of the things you love.

I immediately walked up to my boss and said, "I need 5 minutes of your time." I saw him brace for what he thought was coming, but never did. I asked, "I know that in two weeks, I'm supposed to be gone." He nodded. I continued, "What can I do -" I could visibly see his spine stiffen - "to make sure that when I'm gone, there's not a big hole where I used to work?" The relief I saw on his face was worth gold to me. How does "selfishness" explain this? Simple: I liked the company. I liked my boss. More importantly, I respected both. There was an emergency and the company was correct to shed as much as it could and go lean for a very intense period of lean times (lasted about 3 years).

I appreciate that I've taken up a lot of your time with this, so I will stop here with a question and comment:

Question: Would you like to know what happened next?

Comment: In my view "selfishness" needs to be defined such that business and contracts are ennobled. They are PRIMARY to the well-being of any society, but not merely because of the "transfer of values." They are primary because they are the ONLY WAY that a society can function without people being put on the wrong side of a gun. Business and contracts, embedded in a framework of laws and regulations that mitigate, reduce and even eliminate tragedies of the commons are what make great societies possible.

- Bal

[Selene]

Folks:

Milton Friedman...the pencil...

This three minutes, to me, are irrefutable proof of the power and positive results of capitalism which is a "known ideal" when you open your eyes and see a different arc.

Adam

Edited April 19, 2011 by Selene

[IamBalSimon]

Adam - that was a great, great video!

- Bal

[syrakusos]

"I, Pencil" by Leonard E. Read is a classic.

Of course, the FEE Website has it.

Foundation for Economic Education: http://www.fee.org/library/books/i-pencil-2/

Long in the public domaain, you can also read it here:

Library of Economics and Liberty: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

The Von Mises Institute: http://mises.org/daily/4736

Free Republic: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/760868/posts

Read founded the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946. For a period in the 1940s, philosopher Ayn Rand was an important adviser, or "ghost," as they called it, to Read. In 1950, FEE published The Freeman, an early free market periodical, considered an important forerunner of the conservative National Review magazine, to which Read was also a frequent contributor. He continued to work with FEE until his death in 1983. Read authored 29 books, some of which are still in print and sold by FEE. He wrote numerous essays, including the well-known "I, Pencil" (1958).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Read

[syrakusos]

To tell her story, Rand focused on the near-perfect characters of Galt, Rearden, D'anconia and Taggert. But they all relied on the work products of the non-herculean models of people too. Scenes where John Galt and Eddie Willers are sitting in a coffee shop talking... The coffee shop forms the unnoticed backdrop, presumably run by a business, and served by a decent enough person who makes the lives of those who frequent the shop a bit easier. (I have a great fondness for coffee shops!) The point is that everyone who adds value in our society owes a "thank you" to each other person who adds value.

Ayn Rand explained her choice to write about heroes, even though "common" people share the same virtues. It is easy enough to understand: a business executive or inventor faces a deeper, broader, and more abstract set of daily challenges.

Yet, all through Atlas Shrugged (and The Fountainhead) are nods to the efficacy, and the achievements of ordinary folk. Dagny stops to appreciate a bus being expertly driven. And Dagny rhapsodizes on the coffee shop where she finds refuge after hopping from the limosine on her way to not debating Bertram Scudder. In The Fountainhead, Mike Donnigan is Howard Roark's friend no less than Steven Mallory or Roger Enright.

In the Valley, Dagny asks if this is not the place where all the best men do the lousiest sorts of work, to which comes the reply that there are no lousy jobs, just lousy people who won't do them to the best of their ability.

Like you, I have worked as a technical writer. Also, I have been a computer programmer. But also driven a forklift and a delivery truck and loaded assembly lines and more. I never differentiate the job I do by the pay I get.

Funny thing, too, I thought that you were going to make a point about serving your customer. It is a valid point. Ludwig von Mises in The Anti-Capitalist Mentality points out that people get rich by successfully meeting the desires of other people. That is true. That is why it is important to understand the relationship between self-interest and public service. You cannot invert them, reverse cause and effect. If you start with service, people sink to the crudest forms of self-interest in response. If you start with self-interest, you get the highest achievements, far beyond sports, porn, and fashion accessories to genetic engineering and robots on Mars and beyond.

Once I have secured the deal, however, my focus can soften and other "values" become primary for me. Granted, they would cease to be primary were I not getting paid or if the contract, for whatever reason, ended. ... My primary concern shifted to the well-being of America. I vividly remember walking through the company hallways whisper-whistling Greenwood's "Proud to be an American." I remember contributing to the Red Cross, even though I didn't have the money, and knew that I and my family would be facing some very challenging times. Why? How does "selfishness" explain this? Answer: because it is "selfish" to love America. And you take care of the things you love.

I, too, worked up to 9/11. It was the last time I saw $40 per hour and since then have made about $10 or less. I also gave to the Red Cross in the wake of the disaster. I understand and appreciate the context. And that is the reason why I remind you of your primary motivations. Absent being paid or if the deal otherwise sours, the need to serve others ceases to exist.

You are right, speaking for yourself, that your patriotism is a selfish value. My point is only as you note that it must rest on a primary, rather than being a primary itself.

(So, how did your story end? Did you get to keep your job?)

[IamBalSimon]

Hey Michael...

I definitely need to re-read Atlas. It's not surprising that I might forget some of the detail that you have mentioned.

Regarding the customer of a business... In a very real sense, the customer is the business owner's "boss." The customer sets the specifications for the products or services s/he will buy. In a mass production situation, the business owner sort of reverses this by trying to guess what the masses will want to buy, but ultimately the customer is the boss of the transaction and decides whether a particular company (through it's products and services) will be hired for the transaction or not.

Regarding the rest of the story...

I was kind of unique at this company insofar as I could tell. I had no axe to grind save one: how to make sure that there was as little disruption to the company caused by my absence as possible. At the time, I had not yet read Atlas - so I knew nothing of the objectivist language. All I knew was that people I respected and cared about were in deep trouble and I had a unique opportunity to alleviate some of it. That was it.

The result was that my manager, 2 days before I was set to leave, came to me and said, "Well - you have two more days here." Glumly, I smiled, putting on the bravest face I could. I honestly had no idea what I and my family were going to do about our finances. I was grateful to have worked at this company, to have worked with some of the finest people I'd ever worked with, but my own personal and family situation - financially speaking - was looking somewhat chancy if not bleak.

My boss continued... "There is no way that I can let you go without a fight. It's not my decision, you understand, but I want to fight for you." I smiled and said I was game, what did we have to do?

He said something that I think was very wise: "The company is not in a position to care about what you have done for it. Lots of people here are being let go who have done more for the company than you; people who have been loyal employees for more than 20 years." I nodded in full agreement, as it was certainly the truth.

He continued: "What we need to do is to tell upper management what you will do for the company in the next two weeks. I can't see a way to fight for you in a long term, but I can for a short window. So we need to you to come up with a document that shows what you're doing for the company right now and why others can't do it instead of you."

I was pretty much able to come up with a list of my projects, and I was able to articulate that I was uniquely situated, as the tech writer, to bring the necessary people together to make new critically important decisions. The real challenge was to answer the question, why me? instead of another on-staff tech writer. I chose to not answer that question directly. What I said is that other technical writers were already having their hands filled with emergency tasks and that their bandwidth was tapped. The project I was on had a near-deadline and there was no way any of them could step into the project quickly enough to meet the short deadline.

This was enough for my manager to go to bat with, which he did. The result was that I was given two more weeks. We repeated this process 3 more times as I recall, and finally, they said that I could stay on till my manager no longer could justify it.

About 6 months later, I was told that there was resentment building against me because staffers were still being let go while I, a mere contractor, was being kept on board. Even though none of the staffers was a tech writer, the mentality was that you take care of "your own" before you take care of a visitor, which as a contractor, I was. Again, I fully understood this and respected it. I asked what could be done. My manager said that there was another group that was not affected by 911 the same way that his group was and, as it happened, they they had need of a tech writer. He suggested that I apply and he put in a good word for me.

That kept me on for another 18 months. By then I got tired of working for that group and called a buddy of mine from the first group and asked if it would be OK for me to come back. Timing is everything, and once again - someone upstairs must have been looking out for me - I was told that their current tech writer found another gig and I would be welcomed back. I stayed on with that group for another 4 years till I decided to quit and do other things in 2007.

So there you have it. I think what I did was a kind of "pay it forward," and not for the money, but out of respect and caring. I did this without believing I could save my job. I feel fortunate indeed that things worked out the way they did because upper management could have very easily said, "Sorry - but out you go."

Now - how would you construct this story in Objectivist language?

- Bal

[syrakusos]

About 6 months later, I was told that there was resentment building against me because staffers were still being let go while I, a mere contractor, was being kept on board. Even though none of the staffers was a tech writer, the mentality was that you take care of "your own" before you take care of a visitor, which as a contractor, I was. Again, I fully understood this and respected it.

[...]

Now - how would you construct this story in Objectivist language? - Bal

To take the last point first, I think that you told the story quite well. Anyone familiar with the formal works in Objectivist philosophy, Virtue of Selfishness in particular, should understand your psycho-epistemology. You identified the cognate relationship between your values and your actions. Whether you remembered Atlas Shrugged or not, your choices were the same as Owen Kellogg's and Quentin Daniels's negotiating with Dagny Taggart.

In terms of that philosophy of action, I have to condemn the culture of the enterprise you worked for and warn you against sanctioning it. From my studies in sociology, it is too easy to say that group identifications are "human nature." I have to ask: Which humans? and: What nature? In my world, it does not matter how you get paid - contract, hourly, salaried, commission, wage plus bonus, etc., etc. One nice thing about Honda America and the Japanese in general: everyone wears the same uniform. No one can tell up front how you get paid. We are all team members.

But elsewhere in the automotive industry, I walked through a plant without permission and no one stopped me because I was wearing a tie. I saw production foremen dressed like cops in blue uniforms with radios where the guns go. Engineers on the shop floor resented engineers in the office. That is only too typical of all corporate life which depends on the essential tribalism we call "human nature." But I have to ask: Which humans? and: What nature?

As a contractor, I have been there, too. My last assignment in 2001, on the eve of 9/11, the manager was over budget. We saw it coming. I went around the company, shopping for business for the department. Finally, he let me go because he knew that I could find work for myself, whereas if he released the less competent contractor, "she would be a basket case." It seems fair to protect the weak expecting that the strong can take care of themselves. Is that in the best interest of the organization? Does it reflect the highest values of the manager? Does her emotional weakness entitle her to work for which she was less competent? Did her weakness provide them the fit and marketable values for which they paid her?

That is why I ask just which natures of which humans we reward and reinforce when we grant a sanction to collectivist thinking -- if you can call it "thinking."

Like you, as a contractor, I always made sure that my clients had all the files. I even created meta-documents, explaining how to create the documents, and wrote a mini-manual for the manual entirely in tags. You do that for several reasons: your own self-esteem demands it; your customers will appreciate it; it commends you to others.

But it is not understood for what it is: entrepreneurship. That lack of understanding reflects the deeper societal values - lack of values - regarding enterprise and initiative.

Edited April 21, 2011 by Michael E. Marotta