by George Sibley
The Sunday New York Times is always a good place to go for inspirational reading on the seventh day, especially for us communicants at the American Church of Mammon; early in August it carried interesting stories about a couple of Masters of the Universe.
One story was about Andrew Hall, a commodities trader whose speculations last year in oil futures brought two billion dollars to Citibank and earned him a bonus (not yet paid) of $100 million. His work undoubtedly contributed to the pain Americans felt at the gas pumps last summer, as well as a drag on the overheated economy that finally crashed. His bonus – which he still thinks he deserves (it’s a contract, right?) – became a public matter when we taxpayers gave Citibank $45 billion to help it through its troubles because our leaders deemed it too large to fail. The Treasury Department now has a “pay czar” with some authority to restrict bonus practices in dependent firms that would encourage the kind of risky speculation that led to last year’s economic disasters. But Hall is already being courted by other firms that haven’t needed taxpayer bailout yet, so bonus or no, he will continue putting us all at risk through his service to Mammon – the false god of riches.
But it was the other story that inspired this column – which will eventually get to Central Colorado, so be patient. That story began with a profile of John Allison IV, the chairman and recently retired CEO of BB&T, a “super regional” Carolina bank that Allison built up from a local bank. The news peg of the story was Allison’s high dudgeon about BB&T being “forced” to accept $3.1 billion in TARP (Troublemaking Assh—s Relief Program) funds, even though the firm had avoided the worst speculative excesses of recent years, and has come through the recession thus far in good shape. Allison says the TARP money was “forced” on the bank because TARP’s administrators didn’t want it to look like only big banks were being helped.
BB&T repaid the TARP money this summer, with interest. But for Allison, it’s the principle of the thing. He believes religiously in the unregulated and ungoverned market system, and holds a deep scorn for anyone who would presume to meddle with that system in any way, even when the system crashes and burns. Despite the fact that many of his own colleagues in banking were crying out for governmental help last winter, he resented what he saw as the government’s “headlong rush” to try to salvage the system, and believes with unshakable conviction that TARP and related programs have only made things worse. He believes that only the unleashing of people who are unabashedly looking out for Number One, creating their own wealth in a perfect free market environment, can save America, and those who can’t hack that environment need to get off. They are owed nothing. Welcome to Andrew Hall’s world.
“To say man is bad because he is selfish is to say he’s bad because he’s alive,” Allison was quoted. End of sermon. And the spiritual leader inspiring his sermon is Ayn Rand, the mid-20th century Russian refugee and novelist who wrote a series of novels about heroic, handsome, square-jawed Masters of the Universe. Her novels always had one strong-willed beautiful woman who eventually cat-mates with the most alpha of those alpha males. Like Andrew Hall, these are not nice people in any conventional sense, but in Rand’s universe they alone do good (alone).
Rand’s best-known book is Atlas Shrugged, a 1,000-page doorstop that banker Allison gives to all his new executives to read. And he apparently is not the only one doing that. The Times article said that sales of Atlas Shrugged are soaring. At a time when the cultural faith in unregulated market capitalism is supposedly at an all-time low in America, more than 300,000 copies of “Atlas Shrugged” were sold in the first six months of this year.
Atlas Shrugged is a big sprawling story about good versus evil in the world. Rand’s good people are all hardcore capitalists – Masters of the Universe like the steel-maker Hank Reardon, the copper-miner Francisco d’Anconia, the composer Richard Halley, and the mysterious inventor John Galt. (“Who is John Galt?”) And the requisite beautiful woman is Dagny Taggart, extremely capable heiress to Taggart Transcontinental Railroad and designated trophy wife to whichever master of the universe can master her.
The bad guys in this biblical epic are all socialists allegedly trying to create a more just and equal society through the redistribution of wealth, but really they are just trying – with considerable success, thanks to us gullible masses – to bring the masters down to their craven level. Leaders of this inferior mass are the froggish Wesley Mouch and his convert, Dagny’s own sullen and incompetent little brother James.
The main thread of the story is the gradual disappearance from the world of all the handsome squarejawed capitalists, until finally there are no real “producers of wealth” left in a deteriorating society. And where have the Masters of the Universe gone? To Central Colorado!
Yes, they all retreat to a secret hideaway “in the wildest part of Colorado,” an “Atlantis” owned by Midas Mulligan, the financial font of American economic society until Mouch’s government appropriated his fortunes.
There in Midas’s mountain hideaway, the Masters of the Universe are biding their time till Mouch and his mindless masses have finished screwing up the world as we know it. While biding their time, they have created a small-scale sustainable industrial paradise, each of them cheerfully doing everything he can (and they are all guys except for Dagny) to outwit everyone else in a perfectly balanced market system. This is made possible by a number of fabulous inventions. John Galt’s machine that effectively sucks energy out of the atmosphere for human use (finally that “energy too cheap to meter” we were promised back in the 1950s when this book was written), an effortless “ín situ” process for milking oil out of shale, and mini-foundries for the valley’s sizeable deposits of all the useful minerals – iron, copper, etc. – that industrial society needs. Especially gold, for they are on the gold standard. It is also warm enough to grow everything they need to live like kings. This industrial paradise is protected by a ray shield that prevents anyone from seeing into it from outside. Yes, a mountain valley actually trying to hide itself from tourists.
Are they here somewhere in the wilds of Central Colorado? There are in fact threads of this kind of mythology written into the history of Colorado’s mountain valleys. For example, there’s the Aspen Institute hatched by Chicago industrialist Walter Paepke back in 1950, originally conceived as a mountain retreat for the captains of industry, the masters of the universe, to come relax and revisit the big pictures that get lost in the day-to-day scrabble. It’s now celebrating 60 years of seminars, policy programs, and conferences to “foster enlightened leadership and open-minded dialogue,” but it does admit pinkos like myself so it is nowhere near as pure as Midas Mulligan’s little valley.
There is also the Callaway compound, up in a really high valley in the Elk Mountains above Crested Butte, miles from anywhere, where a retired Texas industrialist built a nest of luxury cabins which were purchased later by Bo Callaway of Georgia, then owner of the Crested Butte Ski Area. This compound was briefly famous for a gathering of Republican leaders in the early 1990s, led by Newt Gingrich, who hammered out the 1994 “Contract on America.” But that hardly ended in enduring triumph for those guys. In fact, in the spirit of objectivity and reason, cornerstones of Rand’s philosophy, most objective analyses of the past two decades suggest that that “contract” led industrial society into economic disasters beyond the imagination even of Rand’s villainous Wesley Mouch.
Last winter another Sunday Times reported that several hedge funders and other types of financial players were lone-eagling it in Crested Butte, doing a couple hours of NY trading before the lifts opened, then enjoying the day on the slopes and coming home to see how much money they had made while playing. Interesting – but it hardly seems serious enough for the no-nonsense hard men of Rand’s universe.
There are, in fact, a lot of people floating around the mountain valleys who seem to accept and try to live by the Rand gospel of reasoned selfishness. But given the modest cabins Rand’s heroes built in Midas’s capitalist mountain paradise, she might not approve of the massive 5,000-50,000 square-foot monuments to themselves the wealthy build here today.
Rand might also have some concerns about the kind of wealth that our current Masters of the Universe create. Andrew Hall created nothing but chaos in “earning” his $100 million bonus. And where is the lighter but stronger steel, the easy affordable shale oil, the energy too cheap to meter that her heroes kept coming up with? Today’s Masters of the Universe seem only able to create economic disaster – and now the mainstream media are trumpeting a Wall Street “recovery.” It isn’t getting down to Main Street, but the best and the brightest have now been bailed out to where they can return to their shell-game economics.
Maybe we ought to find a valley somewhere, and encourage the Masters of the Universe to retreat there and stay out of the way. While we try to rebuild something from their debris, don’t let them establish themselves in Central Colorado.
George Sibley was born is Western Pennsylvania, but was conceived in Colorado, by Colorado natives, and thus considers himself to be a native Coloradan.