Just posted this at the www.RebirthofReason.com objectivist site in response to an article by noted economist and philosopher Tibor Machan regarding the recent executive bonus outrage:
Tibor had ended his piece with "... I realized, to my dismay, that even in the West, even in America, too many people are green with envy and would rather work on bringing down their fellows than getting up there themselves. Shame on them all! " Note that the article was more substantial and nuanced than this, and I don't really disagree with his general position. We shouldn't be envious just because someone else is successful. However, I think that the outrage at the bonuses came more from the perception that the very people who were in general responsible for the business failures were being rewarded. Here's my response:
Today my hard drive gave up at work. On it were files going back to 1990, many of them involving dozens of hours of work, totalling close to half a million files all told, a large portion of them created by me personally as part of my job of publications producer for most of that time, as well as web designer of the very large corporate web site for over ten years.
I spent the entire day desperately trying to copy the most critical files to one of the intranet drives, as one in a hundred, then one in twenty, then one in five files glitched the system, forcing a cold reboot, over and over and over again, watching almost twenty years of work crash and burn. I can project that I will lose 80% at best.
I know my job. I told management repeatedly for months that the hard drive was failing, and that I did not have any verification that the backup software was in fact working, nor any other place to backup the drive in a cost-effective way. I was told not to worry about it - in a hostile tone. The automatic backup software, like all the rest of my software was installed by someone else entirely, the details kept secret from me, stemming from management policies best exemplified by Jim Taggart*. My expressed concern - like that of Eddie Willers* - generated the "Don't Bother Me" response. If I knew more then I could express more, so best to keep me in the dark.
Because the whole management is at a trade show, the guy who IS authorized to do something was gone with them and I had verbal permission to try to deal with the situation. Then I discovered that the backup system he installed had not been working for a month and its files were also corrupted. The most ridiculous part of it may be that they had the same experience only six months ago when their main intranet drive, with all the financial data and records on it, died, and they then realized that no one had backed it up, even though the backup drive on the server was connected and running. No one had installed the software. Everyone and no one was responsible.
Now they will lose at least a million dollars as a consequence. But they will still have their power, and their executive compensation - maybe slightly diminished at worst. So the essentials will have been preserved. (I may be fired, as my added value is now seriously diminished, due to the loss of the files that constituted the backbone of product information and marketing, both for the U.S. company and its Taiwan branch. That way it will be easier to forget who is actually responsible, as well.)
There are Hank Reardon's* and Dagny Taggart's* out there. They deserve all those bonuses and whatever else their value added productivity provides them. The crash and burn of our overall economy, however, is a clear signal that they are not generally in charge, which should not be news to objectivists. The proper issue is how we got to this point, and what to do about it so it doesn't get worse, as the crooks hang together to game the system all the way down.
*These are famous characters in Ayn Rand's popular philosophical novel, "Atlas Shrugged," which depicted a society in many ways similar to our own today, with a general collapse of the economy, while the crooks at the top made out like the thieves they were.