Why Leonard Peikoff, and the Top 1 Percent, Are Way Off Base

I've recently gone back to Ayn Rand, whose work and philosophy has been instrumental in my upbringing; my mother's parents, after all, were die-hard Objectivists who attended many of Ayn Rand's lectures during the 1970s. Even before I read any of Rand's work in high school, I was raised with the basic tenants of her philosophy: believe in the individual spirit, and work toward making yourself a better person: this was the main thing I remember. That still rings true today, and I believe it is one of the most important and truthful aspect of the philosophy. As for the rest however.... well, we'll see about that.

I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in my senior year of high school. At the time they were life-changing, inspirational, and amazing. I did disagree with several points of Rand's philosophy, but they were minor. I am now three years older, and three years wiser. I am, therefore, going to do what many may consider unthinkable: I am going to reread Atlas Shrugged, and note which ideas I now disagree with, seeing as how I have evolved over the course of three years from a slightly to the right moderate to a liberal.

First though, I want to address an essay written by the heir to Ayn Rand's estate, and her handpicked heir to the head of the Objectivist movement, Leonard Peikoff. The title essay of the book Why Businessmen Need Philosophy, first published in 1999, is as indicative today as it was over twelve years ago of the state of denial businessmen are in.

White males, for instance, should not be so “greedy,” we hear regularly; they should sacrifice more for women and the minorities. Both employers and employees are callous, we hear; they spend their energy worrying about their own futures, trying to become even richer, when they should be concerned with serving their customers. Americans are far too affluent, we hear; they should be transferring some of their abundance to the poor, both at home and abroad.

I think it is callous to care more about expanding your wealth to even greater proportions without giving a damn about the people you employ or provide goods/services to. Rand was never concerned with being called "callous" because she acknowledged that she was selfish to begin with, and that everyone should only be concerned with their own well-being. Why is it not a good thing to worry about the less fortunate? As to the first part of the paragraph: just wow. Those poor rich white men, oh wait, you only said white males period - they have to "sacrifice" for women and minorities. Last time I checked those two groups were not asking for sacrifice, they were asking for equality in the workplace and in government. That's not a "sacrifice," Mr. Peikoff. Unless you were suggesting that white males are being called upon to give money to the poor unfortunate "women and minorities," which is a similarly distasteful assertion.


And yes sir, I do believe the rich should not be hoarding the wealth, especially when it's wealth is often generated by manipulating loopholes in the tax codes, cheating innocent hardworking people out of money they deserve in some capacity or another, and lobbying government.

If a poor man finds a job and rises to the level of buying his own health insurance, for instance, that is not a moral achievement, we are told; he is being selfish, merely looking out for his own or his family’s welfare. But if the same man receives his health care free from Washington, using a credit card or a law made by Bill Clinton, that is idealistic and noble. Why? Because sacrifice is involved: sacrifice extorted from employers, by the employers’ mandate, and from doctors through a noose of new regulations around their necks.

Since when have people who are able to afford health insurance being called selfish? I've never heard that claim.

In fact, you really are selfish. You are selfish in the noblest sense, which is inherent in the very nature of business: you seek to make a profit, the greatest profit possible—by selling at the highest price the market will bear while buying at the lowest price. You seek to make money—gigantic amounts of it, the more the better—in small part to spend on personal luxury, but largely to put back into your business, so that it will grow still further and make even greater profits.

Hmm, last time I checked, CEOs always take home a ton of money to invest in personal things like luxurious mansions and yachts.


I fail to see how those with less money and influence in the world can even stand a chance against the monied class, the class that has the money and power to influence corporations and government. The corporations were left to their own devices for nearly a decade, leading up to a financial crisis that the ones responsible are unwilling to fix, much less acknowledge their part in.

As a businessman, you make your profit by being the best you can be in your work, i.e., by creating goods or services that your customers want. You profit not by fraud or robbery, but by producing wealth and trading with others.

Except that often times, fraud and robbery is exactly how businessmen make their millions. The honest businessmen are not the people being protested against or vilified, it is the businessmen who profit at the expense of others who are being rallied against. How can you not see the difference?

The great businessman is like a great musician, or a great man in any field. The composer focuses on creating his music; his goal is to express his ideas in musical form, the particular form which most gratifies and fulfills him himself. If the audience enjoys his concerto, of course he is happy—there is no clash between him and his listeners—but his listeners are not his primary concern. His life is the exercise of his creative power to achieve his own selfish satisfaction. He could not function or compose otherwise. If he were not moved by a powerful, personal, selfish passion, he could not wring out of himself the necessary energy, effort, time and labor; he could not endure the daily frustrations of the creative process. This is true of every creative man. It is also true of you in business, to the extent that you are great, i.e., to the extent that you are creative in organization, management, long-range planning, and their result: production.

Business to a creative man is his life. His life is not the social results of the work, but the work itself, the actual job—the thought, the blueprints, the decisions, the deals, the action. Creativity is inherently selfish; productivity is inherently selfish.

Either a man cares about the process of production, or he does not. If he cares about the process, it must be his primary concern; not the beneficiaries of the process, but the personal fulfillment inherent in his own productive activity. If he does not care about it, then he cannot produce.

We cannot just invest in businesses, we need to invest in people. People are necessary to make businesses run and succeed; to ignore the needs of the people who work for a business at every level, shareholders, and its customers is to engage in the kind of selfishness that is dishonorable: profit at the expense of others' welfare. Isn't this what you are accusing the non-elite members of the country of doing? It's great for someone to love his work and to live for that work, but a business is not a one-man job; a successful business needs more than one person behind it, and in the case of big corporations, it is not one businessman but many who are involved. I do appreciate someone who finds fulfillment in what he or she is doing, but not when it infringes upon the rights of others.

 If the welfare of others were your primary aim, then you would have to dismantle your business. For instance, you would have to hire needy workers, regardless of their competence—whether or not they lead you to a profit. Why do you care about profit, anyway? As an altruist, you seek to sacrifice yourself and your business, and these workers need the jobs. Further, why charge customers the highest price you can get—isn’t that selfish? What if your customers need the product desperately? Why not simply give away goods and services as they are needed? An altruist running a business like a social work project would be a destroyer—but not for long, since he would soon go broke. Do you see Albert Schweitzer running General Motors? Would you have prospered with Mother Teresa as the CEO of your company?

Peikoff, then, has gone on to insinuate that if you aren't a ruthless, selfish businessman, you are a complete altruist who wants to give everything away. There is a middle ground of course, but Peikoff can't seem to conceive of that fact. Either you are a successful, morally-selfish individual, or you are someone who lives vicariously through others. Mr. Peikoff, I don't know if you know this, but people need people in order to survive. Depending on others in some form doesn't mean those people live for you, it means they have hearts. Also, what do you have against Mother Teresa? She surely did a hell of a lot more good in her life than pretty much any CEO.

 Some of you may reply: “But I really am an altruist. I do live for a higher purpose. I don’t care excessively about myself or even my family. I really want primarily to serve the needy.” This is a possible human motive—it is a shameful motive, but a possible one. If it is your motive, however, you will not be a successful businessman, not for long. Why is it shameful? Let me answer by asking the altruists among you: Why do you have such low self-esteem? Why don’t you and those you love deserve to be the beneficiaries of your efforts. Are you excluded from the Declaration of Independence merely because you are a businessman? Does a producer have no right to happiness? Does success turn you into a slave?

First: it is not shameful to care about others who are less fortunate than you. To even assert that it is shameful is a disgusting insinuation. Second: the businessman is not the slave here. The slaves are the workers who depend on the whim of their millionaire bosses who probably don't even know their names, much less care about them in the slightest.

It is interesting to note that while addressing the invisible "businessman" Peikoff relates to said individual as a man, as seen here:

Why should you care about this philosophic history? As a practical man, you must care; because it is an issue of life and death.

This goes back to the first quote listed above, in which Peikoff bemoans the people who "demand" that white males sacrifice for women (and minorities). Ayn Rand clearly idolized the masculine aspects of humankind, because they are what she appreciates most. It is sad however that this has manifested (both in her work and, most especially, in her followers') as an ugly form of anti-feminism.

Look at reality—at today’s culture—and observe what the country thinks of business these days. Popular movies provide a good indication. Do not bother with such obviously left-wing movies as Wall Street, the product of avowed radicals and business-haters. Consider rather the highly popular Tim Allen movie The Santa Clause. It was a simple children’s fantasy about Santa delivering gifts; it was seasonal family trivia that upheld no abstract ideas or philosophy, the kind of movie which expressed only safe, non-controversial, self-evident sentiments. In the middle of the movie, with no plot purpose of any kind, the story leaves Santa to show two “real businessmen”: toy manufacturers scheming gleefully to swindle the country’s children with inferior products (allegedly, to make greater profits thereby). After which, the characters vanish, never to be seen again. It was a sheer throwaway—and the audience snickers along with it approvingly, as though there is no controversy here. “Everybody knows that’s the way businessmen are.”

Imagine the national outcry if any other minority—and you are a very small minority—were treated like this. If a “quickie” scene were inserted into a movie to show that females are swindlers, or gays, or blacks—the movie would be denounced, reedited, sanitized, apologized for and pulled from the theaters. But businessmen? Money-makers and profit-seekers? In regard to them, anything goes, because they are wicked, i.e., selfish. They are “pigs,” “robbers,” “villains”—everyone knows that! Incidentally, to my knowledge, not one businessman or group of them protested against this movie.

Because white businessmen are the victims here. You have got to be joking, Mr. Peikoff.

But it gets worse:

Ecologists claim that our resources are vanishing and blame it on businessmen, who squander natural resources for selfish profit. If a broker dares to take any financial advantage from a lifetime of study and contacts in his field, he is guilty of “insider trading.” If racial discrimination is a problem, businessmen must pay for it by hiring minority workers, whether qualified or not. If sexual harassment is a problem, businessmen are the villains; they must be fondling their downtrodden filing clerks, as they leave for the bank to swindle the poor widows and orphans. The litany is unmistakable: if anybody has any trouble of any kind, blame the businessman—even if a customer spills a cup of her coffee miles away from the seller’s establishment. By definition, businessmen have unlimited liability. They are guilty of every conceivable crime because they are guilty of the worst, lowest crime: selfishness.

Why "insider trading"? It's insider trading, period. Are you making an excuse for that behavior?
Businesses are required to hire a certain number of minorities because studies have proven that businesses, when given an opportunity, pass up more or equally qualified minorities in favor of white males.

And are you really, really, making an excuse for sexual harassment? This one confounds me because it doesn't make sense in the context of the rest of the essay. All I see here is more looking down at women. The people who get accused of sexual harassment are usually doing it, sir. In fact many cases aren't reported because the women need to keep their jobs. They aren't guilty of being selfish, they're guilty of sexual harassment.

Additionally, are you familiar with the hot coffee case, Mr. Peikoff? Check it out. The woman in question received third-degree burns from the coffee, and all she wanted was for her medical costs to be covered.

The main issue I have here is that Peikoff assumes that all businessmen are despised because they have money and they are selfish. He assumes that businessmen are only trading according to the free market, and that the things that hold him as well as the economy back are people who want in on the action and demand sacrifice. The white male businessman, the obvious target of the essay, is at a strong advantage; he's comfortable, even if the rest of the world hates him for his underhanded ways and lack of concern for his fellow man or woman. But you, sir, intend to tell this man that he is actually moral for doing what he does?

Interestingly enough, I didn't realize that this essay was more than a decade old until I read the final paragraph. Interesting that, after all this time, nobody's learned a damned thing.