Cuffy Meigs and people like him gain prominence. As the country becomes more fully socialistic, thugs like Cuffy Meigs, whose only goal is to plunder, take control. When the government robs the productive, it also attracts criminals to itself. Dagny realizes that it makes no difference if the railroad’s storehouses are raided to support the needy or to bloat the gangsters; either way, the producers are expropriated, making the creation of goods and services impossible. Whether motivated by starvation or exploitation, the welfare workers and the criminals are united in the act of robbing the productive.
Cuffy Meigs sends the Minnesota freight cars to Louisiana because he gets a kickback from the politicians funding the soybean project. If Eugene Lawson, the sniveling former banker, were running the railroad, he would send the cars to Louisiana because the starving people of the blighted southern areas desperately need soybeans. Either way, the wheat growers of Minnesota are abandoned, the railroad is transformed into an instrument of bureaucratic whim, and the citizens are left without grain. When altruism is the dominant moral code, the producers are robbed. Every parasite can join the feeding frenzy.
This chapter’s title refers to the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Ayn Rand shows what the religious injunction to be your brother’s keeper looks like in practice. Three instances in this chapter embody this injunction. The first instance occurs when the seed grain and the future existence of the Nebraska farmers is seized to feed the starving populace of Sand Creek, Illinois. In this age of enlightenment, says Eugene Lawson, men realize that they are all their brothers’ keepers. The second instance occurs when James Taggart, desperate to hold on to the looters’ policies that grant him power, begs Dagny to somehow find a way to make the policies work. “Dagny, I’m your brother,” he pleads. Despite his role in Cherryl’s death, the endless roadblocks he has placed in Dagny’s path, and the literal impossibility of making the policies work, he appeals to sibling obligation, hoping to force Dagny into action. The third instance occurs when Philip Rearden, an irresponsible moocher concerned that his gravy train will end if Rearden retires and vanishes, pleads for a job that he can’t successfully perform. His brazen request is possible only because he feels justified in arguing that an obligation to one’s brother should supersede all other considerations. In all cases, Ayn Rand shows that the unproductive try to argue that an individual is obligated to help either his literal brother or his figurative brothers—humanity. She insists that the motive behind this injunction is to enslave the productive to the moochers, who feel that they have biblical license to take what they want.
