US Election 2004

In an election year that should be focusing upon the evil of terrorists, both major candidates spend campaign time talking above the evil of businessman, while promising to take the fruit produced by the productive businessman and redistribute it public goods.
 
With Kerry, his harsh rhetoric hides his willingness to protect businesses who will pay shakedown money, and support expansion of government programs (for example, growing automaker support for expanded public healthcare).

With Bush, his rhetoric seems gentle but the heavy handed actions of his administration against businessmen speak louder (see Skip Oliva, The Philosophic State of the Union , Initium, 1/23/2004).

In USA Today, Del Jones discusses the anti-CEO perspectives in movies.

It's only getting worse. But do they deserve it? "It's a bum rap," says Robert Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines.

A more important question may be whether disparaging CEOs is harmless entertainment or does it have a lasting impact on a system that has made the USA the world's economic engine?

"Most CEOs are honest and hardworking. Creating the idea that all CEOs are bad is adverse for society," says Crandall, who, while widely respected, was not universally loved by his troops.

Get used to it. CEOs have long awaited the promised production of the movie Atlas Shrugged from the 1957 Ayn Rand novel that portrays business leaders as heroic and society's saviors. The screenplay is supposedly being written, but that's been reported before.  [D. Jones, America loves to hate dastardly CEOs, USA Today, 9/15/2004]

Jones’ reference to Atlas Shrugged introduced a perspective missing from the presidential campaign.  From the book, in a scene referred to as Francisco’s Money Speech, America is identified favorably as a country of money based upon the concepts of reason, justice, freedom, production, and achievement.  But what does this distinction from history and other countries mean?

For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.
 
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted of obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.
 
Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide— as, I think, he will.  [A. Rand, excepted from the novel Atlas Shrugged on AtlasShrugged.tv ; for audio excerpt from Chapter 1 of AS click HERE]

Regarding the concept of the self-made man, see Bobbie Carlyle’s sculpture Self-Made Man at the Quent Cordair Fine Art Gallery, especially the Boulder Colorado installation and the animated 360 degree view [Hat Tip to the Egoist].

Image Source: Ayn Rand Bookstore

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