What’s my favorite book? That’s a question I am often asked, and it’s become harder to answer these past few years. The titles and authors I’ve named for decades come readily to mind, but I’ve started to wonder if those answers are still true. It’s been years since I’ve read some of them, and while they appealed to the teenage or undergraduate version of me, I wondered if they still would now that I am an adult. I have a friend – big Hemingway fan - who recently told me that he never cared for The Old Man and the Sea when he read it in high school, but when he re-read it in middle-age, it landed a lot differently.
And so last summer, at the active encouragement of my good friend Worth Wray, I reread Atlas Shrugged. I rediscovered Objectivism and quickly became intellectually obsessed with Ayn Rand’s thinking. I reread the books of my youth, tearing through Anthem and The Virtues of Selfishness, We the Living, and Capitalism. Her insights into class warfare, tyranny, freedom, and the distinction between producers and looters now had an urgent relevance that I didn’t recall in my college reading of her work.
In much of Western culture, the capitalist is often portrayed as a villain, exploiting workers for his personal gain. For Rand, the businessman who created and built and hired was the hero of the story; production was the greatest virtue. And Rand saw business as a unique xxxxxx against tyranny. She wrote that while other professions exist in totalitarian societies – politicians, farmers, teachers, scientists, soldiers – businessmen do not. Businessmen are what distinguish capitalist from statist societies, and Rand saw them as the ultimate symbol of freedom. One of her key messages was that there was a massive difference between businessmen who produce and bureaucrats who live off the production of others.
Rediscovering Rand was one of the reasons I decided to start a business last fall, something I wrote about in my last post. I had written and thought and taught about business. I had advised and served on the boards of some of the largest companies in the world. I had even started a few small businesses, usually focused on ideas and the abstract (I had often referred to myself as an “entrepreneur of ideas”). It was time to start and run a business that created something tangible and concrete, while also creating jobs.
And hence I formed Goodwell Foods, a private label frozen pizza manufacturer located in Pittsfield, NH that now employs several dozen people. We went from standing still to sprinting…
