I Am John Galt Read Online Free PDF Page A

wealthy as a result?
    Do you want these things for your own sake? Then make it so. We’ll help you by showing you how others have done it, by profiling both the heroes who make our world great and the villains out to destroy it.
    If it just happens to save the world in the process, then so much the better.

Chapter 3
    The Leader
    John Allison as John Galt, the man who walked away after building America’s strongest bank
    â€œHe turned and answered, ‘I will stop the motor of the world.’ Then he walked out. We never saw him again. We never heard what became of him. But years later, when we saw the lights going out one after another, in the great factories that had stood solid like mountains for generations . . . and the world was crumbling quietly, like a body when its spirit is gone—then we began to wonder and to ask questions about him. . . . You see, his name was John Galt.”
    â€”Atlas Shrugged
    Who is John Galt?
    Ayn Rand’s magnum opus Atlas Shrugged is set in a time of a growing economic, cultural, and political crisis. We hear over and over a slang expression adopted by people from all walks of life to capture their despair and resignation: “Who is John Galt?”
    It turns out that John Galt is an actual person, and that he has deliberately fomented the crisis. He is a brilliant young scientist who conceived a breakthrough invention—a motor that could be driven without fuel, something of incalculable economic value that today would be called green technology. Yet he walks away from his invention, and his career.
    Galt’s abdication—his “mind on strike”—is triggered when the factory that employs him adopts a managerial model based on the Marxist maxim “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” He believes that this collectivist philosophy, which would punish the competent and reward the incompetent, is both immoral and a recipe for economic collapse. The only moral response is to refuse to participate in such immorality—which would have the side effect of hastening the collapse.
    But Galt takes his strike one big step further. He sets about persuading other men of ability to go on strike, too, giving up their work as industrialists, businessmen, financiers, teachers, artists, and doctors. He recruits them to his strike by explaining to them the fundamental moral basis of capitalism, and the inherent immorality of a culture that expropriates their talents, turning their own virtues against them.
    At the climax of the book, Galt takes to the radio, revealing himself to the world and explaining his strike and the philosophy behind it. Galt’s speech is the key reference documenting Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism.”
    In November 2008, 30 days before his scheduled retirement, John Allison sat atop a black office tower in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, preparing to sign away his life’s work.
    He’d spent 37 years, his entire career, at BB&T (or, more formally, Branch Banking and Trust Company). When he arrived in 1971, it was an obscure farm bank with 250 employees and $250 million in assets. Allison became president in 1987 and chief executive in 1989, and by 2008 he was the longest-serving bank CEO in the United States. Under his leadership BB&T had grown into a bank holding company with 1,800 branches sprawling over 12 Southern states and Washington, D.C., among the top 10 banks in all but one of those markets. BB&T has 30,000 employees and over $150 billion in assets, making it the 12th largest U.S. bank.
    Now he was being forced to give substantial control of it to the U.S. government.
    And not because BB&T had failed, as so many other banks had in the terrifying banking crisis of 2008. No, BB&T was being punished because it had succeeded.
    BB&T had made no subprime mortgage loans. While other banks blew themselves up with high-fee negative amortization and “pick-a-payment”