The Land of the Dollar Bill

The Land of the Dollar Bill

For some reason that 1974 song by a band called Paperlace, The Night Chicago Died is running in my head like the sound of running feet and the shouting in the street. I had a peaceful enough Saturday that had no particular connection to Al Capone’s gangland Chicago, but when does that matter when a line of lyrics gets wedged into your brain? The reason I suspect I am thinking about the land of the dollar bill is because I am preparing for this next week’s ethics debate. The topics I want to explore are the impact (good and bad) of government regulation and where the ethical boundaries are in that balancing act. The other topic (I’m finding that ethical issues are almost all inextricably linked) is the trade off between personal Liberty and the common good. That is a particularly big topic and one we will revisit a few times as the semester goes along.

This week I have my motorcycle friend Roger speaking to the class. I decided early on that I wanted to teach them the value in keeping an open mind around ethical issues and the importance of hearing out other views that may contrast with your own. This is the reality of business and life that we all face. There will always be conflicting views because perspectives, circumstances and experiences differ. It is not necessary to agree with or even tolerate views you find objectionable, but it is important to hear them out in totality before discarding them or outwardly disagreeing with them. Without that there can be no civil discourse, no diplomacy and only open conflict. The greater good always involves keeping an open and civil mind. Roger always pushes me to my limits of tolerance in that regard, so I thought who better to help me teach this lesson.

It would be hard not to know where Roger stands on government involvement and regulation of private enterprise. He is quite outspoken about the inefficiency of government and the importance of libertarian supremacy. I’m sure he too has limits and feels some regulation and some common good has a place in our lives, but it will be interesting to hear those and test the limits he sets.

Since I have gotten in the habit of using a movie to highlight the theme of the week, I asked Roger what movie he thought might best spur the debate for his case study on the pricing policy of his toll bridge in Atlantic City. We agreed that if I am a proponent of the words and philosophies espoused by John Steinbeck, then Roger is a follower of Ayn Rand and her cult of Objectivity as portrayed in her most notable novel, Atlas Shrugged. They recently made a four-part movie of this magnum opus of hers, so we agreed to have them watch Part 1, which sets up the commercial ethical conundrum. That is what has driven me into the land of the dollar bill.

I decided to watch Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 again in preparation for the class. It is actually a very confusing story. It is Orwellian (1984) or perhaps Huxleyan (Brave New World) with its depiction of a dystopic world gone somewhat mad. Where Steinbeck’s world of Dust Bowl or Depression-era America was all too real, it was still dystopic in that it was a world of great human suffering and injustice. While he knew the world through the eyes of someone growing up in Salinas in Monterrey County, California during the dramatic times of the Great Depression, he was still from a Middle Class family and had the advantage of attending nearby Stanford University. But Ayn Rand had an even more dramatic upbringing in St. Petersburg, Russia and forced, as a Jew, to live through first the Russian Empire, then the Bolshevik Revolution leading to the Russian Republic, followed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and then the Soviet Union. Those were not passing movements that were just in the newspapers, but rather every step impacted her family in one way or another, mostly with a very real personal cost. For example, she too attended University as part of the egalitarian wave empowering Russian women, only to be purged for being too bourgeoisie. Finally, in the late 1920’s, as Steinbeck was living on a boat in Monterrey Bay, writing Cannery Row, Rand was emigrating to the U.S., strangely enough, starting out in Chicago, while Al Capone was having his way with the city. She was so smitten with American movies that she moved to Hollywood and, by chance, came to work with Cecil B. DeMille, the quintessential Hollywood mogul.

It was this background and its stark contrast in perspective with a man like John Steinbeck, that gave Ayn Rand the impetus to write about the evils of collectivism. As she gained acclaim as a novelist, she moved to New York City and gathered around her an intelligentsia that included none other than Alan Greenspan, the future Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 until 2006 and therefore did more to influence one of the great eras of American wealth accumulation and growing wealth distribution disparity. I feel quite conflicted by Ayn Rand and what she stands for. I am one of the lucky ones that flourished during the heyday of Greenspans years, actually making Partner at my firm in 1987 and finally running my Wall Street course into the ground in 2007 as Greenspan’s “excess exuberance” became a reality. Those were my good years and yet, Rand’s denigration of collectivism runs counter to my personal political philosophy and upbringing. What Ayn Rand wrote about and what Alan Greenspan helped turn into reality was, indeed, the land of the dollar bill, the money culture that has driven the United States for the 35 years.

Watching Atlas Shrugged has brought back all those conflicts to mind. The industrialists who want to show concern for the common man and the workers are depicted as weak and stupid, and a bit conniving, politically. The individualistic thought leaders are led themselves by the symbolic, elusive figure of John Galt. While Steinbeck is heralding the “Everyman” of Tom Joad, Ayn Rand is putting John Galt on a pedestal for his libertarian extremism. Rand objectifies life by having her heroes say quite bluntly that they are doing what they’re doing, just for the money. That is not only OK, that is good in Rand’s eyes. She is the ultimate believer in the trickle-down economic philosophy. Empowering the workers or driving the economy through turbocharged consumerism is simply not on her agenda. She lived that dream in Bolshevik Russia and wants no more of it. Money and the pursuit of it by sheer intellect and toughness is all that matters in her vision of the world. Liberalism is a meal that is going down badly with a chaser of political corruption and misplaced birthright.

I will end by paraphrasing Paperlace. When it came to those years when America was nothing more than the land of the dollar bill, “Brother what a night the people saw”, but “Brother what a fight the people [will see]”.