Black as Rearden
George Jonas had an article in Today’s Post in which he compared Lord Black to a ‘character out of an Ayn Rand Novel”.
He was referring to Black in the context of his wrongful conviction. He wrote:
Larceny through government isn’t new, though we usually expect to see it in Russia or China. But in our days of government intervention, it has become as lucrative to investigate, regulate or tear down businesses as to build them, in America as well. Unlike bank robbers, corporate scavengers carry no firearms. They point regulators at their targets, a grand jury being their biggest gun.
This got me thinking back to the Ayn Rand reference and to the trial of Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged :
A few years ago, they would have jeered at his air of self-confident wealth. But today, there was a slate-grey sky in the windows of the courtroom, which promised the first snowstorm of a long, hard winter; the last of the country’s oil was vanishing, and the coal mines were not able to keep up with the hysterical scramble for winter supplies. The crowd in the courtroom remembered that this was the case which had cost them the services of Ken Danagger. There were rumours that the output of the Danagger Coal Company had fallen perceptibly within one month; the newspapers said that it was merely a matter of readjustment while Danagger’s cousin was reorganising the company he had taken over. Last week, the front pages had carried the story of a catastrophe on the site of a housing project under construction: defective steel girders had collapsed, killing four workmen; the newspapers had not mentioned, but the crowd knew, that the girders had come from Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel.
They sat in the courtroom in heavy silence and they looked at the tall, grey figure, not with hope – they were losing the capacity to hope – but with an impassive neutrality spiked by a faint question mark; the question mark was placed over all the pious slogans they had heard for years.
The newspapers had snarled that the cause of the country’s troubles, as this case demonstrated, was the selfish greed of rich industrialists; that it was men like Hank Rearden who were to blame for the shrinking diet, the falling temperature and the cracking roofs in the homes of the nation; that if it had not been for men who broke regulations and hampered the government’s plans, prosperity would have been achieved long ago; and that a man like Hank Rearden was prompted by nothing but the profit motive. This last was stated without explanation or elaboration, as if the words “profit motive” were the self-evident brand of ultimate evil.
