The story that the hobo tells about the Twentieth Century Motor Company is important for several reasons. First, Rand uses it to demonstrate the consequences of communism in practice. The primary question raised by a communist system is how an individual’s needs can be determined. If a group permits each individual to determine his or her own needs, the group faces the daunting task of having to satisfy every person’s desires. The problem is not necessarily that people are unscrupulous; the problem is that in such a case, there is no way to achieve objectivity. Does a man need a car or merely desire it? Does a woman require her house to be painted, or is a new coat of paint desirable but nonessential? Does a man need those books or musical recordings that he loves, which add so much meaning to his life? Who should answer such questions, and by what standard could they judge?
Questions of need cannot be answered objectively. Need is a vague and undefinable term in this context. At the Twentieth Century Motor Company, the group voted to decide the needs of each individual, just as the group decided the projected output of each worker based on ability. As a result, each individual was enslaved to the group; his income was determined by his ability to beg rather than by his productive effort. No worker could feel the pride that comes from earning money as a direct result of hard work.
When income is severed from production, incentive necessarily wanes and productivity declines. When the factory’s output dropped, the group determined that some people were not working in accordance with their ability. The group sentenced those people to work overtime— without pay, of course, because income is based on need. Not surprisingly, the employees soon started to hate each other and to hide all signs of ability. As a logical consequence, declining production condemned the factory to bankruptcy.
Rand indicates that the worst evil of this communist ideal is that it rewards misery and punishes virtue. It ties a man’s income to the number and severity of misfortunes that he and his family experience. It turns his productive ability into a curse, condemning him to ceaselessly toil for the satisfaction of his neighbor’s unending desires. The more ability an individual shows, the more he is sentenced to unremitting slavery for the needy, with no gain for his effort. Rand insists that this is the antithesis of a proper moral code, which celebrates the creation of abundance and rewards it by tying income directly to production. Man’s life on earth is made possible by virtue of his productivity, not his suffering. Justice and the ability to live successfully require that productive ability be the standard of determining a man’s income, not his needs or pain.
The second and more important impact of the story told by Jeff Allen regards John Galt. Dagny now has reason to suspect that there may be a literal John Galt, who is responsible for stopping the motors and draining the brains of the world. If the hobo’s story is true, then the destroyer Dagny fears may be this John Galt, who vowed years ago to stop the motor of the world. Dagny has an important clue in her quest to hunt down the destroyer.
