Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Wisconsin Policy Research Institute columnist Mike Nichols observes something missed by most readers of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:

John Galt was a Wisconsinite.

Rand’s Galt was born in Ohio, but didn’t stay there long. He became a young engineer in an auto factory in Wisconsin before it, predictably, went out of business. He was an individualist and inventor who, stifled by the collectivism embraced by all the Wisconsinites around him, had to flee our state for a greener pasture – or, actually, valley.

Sound kind of familiar?

The first thought when I read this was that Galt must have worked for our late American Motors Corp. (Probably not Kissel, or FWD Corp.)

Actually …

Rand’s great “Twentieth Century Motor Company” is set in fictional Starnesville, Wisconsin — which so far as I can figure is a little northwest of Stevens Point. When Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden (operating vice president of Taggart Transcontinental and founder of Rearden Steel, respectively) come upon it, it is nothing but an abandoned, dilapidated, cavernous shell of a factory that contains only one thing of value — the partial remnants of a motor that, they realize, looks capable of transforming static electricity into power.

Much later, Dagny finds why its inventor — and her future lover — abandoned it and the factory both. Galt left after his co-workers voted in favor of a new plan in which all employee earnings belonged to “the family” and compensation was based only on the degree of “need.”

Production and profits immediately fell and, soon enough, workers had been transformed into virtual panhandlers. The whole place ended up going bankrupt.

I wonder if the residents of Junction City realize their community plays a role in one of the most debated-upon and inspirational-to-conservatives-and-libertarians works of the 20th century.

Why Wisconsin? An archivist at the Ayn Rand Institute theorized a combination of Wisconsin’s “history of embracing Germanic social welfare policies” and our history as a manufacturing center.

Rand died in 1982. So the investigation could no longer include an interview, or questions about her thoughts on recent news of automobile plant closings caused in part by unsustainable union contracts, by the lagging per capita income in this state, by the startling recent news that Wisconsin now has more government jobs than manufacturing positions, by the ongoing “brain drain” of good minds to other places, or by the fascinating advances in nanotechnology around here that could lead to lighter stronger metals, but also by our state’s general deficiency of entrepreneurs.

Rand, you have to guess, would say she made Wisconsin a focal point of her book for a simple reason. It’s not a place where business generally thrives. …

Who was John Galt?

It’s worth remembering that he was — till he was driven away — one of us.