But what if some entrepreneur simply said, "No, thanks, I don't think I'll make something of value to you on those terms. You'll just have to do without."
First of all, the rule-makers don't acknowledge this possibility. In their experience, people who can make money will always choose to make money; they don't believe that money-makers care HOW the money is made. Lawmakers assume that any "no" is merely positional bargaining, and that all that is needed to get things moving is compromise -- and compromise is all they were hoping for. And in fact, this is how businesses operate today, by means of maintaining relationships with lawmakers and endeavoring to get the lawmakers to point their guns at someone else (see, for example, the use of antitrust laws). Lawmakers do not acknowledge principles; lawmakers figure that a producer will always take the chance to create a million-dollar fortune even if the producer knows that, if things were unregulated, he or she could make ten million. After all, one million is better than nothing! And it's a larger fortune than any lawmaker could ever create.
However, let's assume for the sake of argument that lawmakers have stopped evading facts and have explicitly acknowledged to themselves that producers have free will and can simply say "no." You'd figure this would upset the lawmakers, right? I mean, people need widgets, including lawmakers. No-one wants to "do without" -- isn't that right?
Wrong. We saw the answer to this question in Atlas Shrugged. The lawmakers don't care about making their own lives better. They only care about cutting talented, productive people down to size. The motive is egalitarianism -- equality of result -- no matter how horrible the result.
They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself . . . .The response by "reasonable" people to a statement like the quote above from Atlas Shrugged, is: "Don't go to extremes! We need the government to protect us from bad people, but you just want anarchy!"
- The Ayn Rand Lexicon, "Envy/Hatred of the Good for Being the Good"
If this is your objection, I have a thought experiment for you.
Consider a thing, a product, a service, that enhances the value of your life. Let's say it's your iPhone (I have no reason in particular for choosing that example -- I don't own one). Now answer a single question: where did it come from?
Someone invented it, then made it, then offered for sale. You went to work, earned money, and decided to spend some your money on purchasing it.
Unless you made the iPhone yourself, you didn't have a right to a single molecule of that product until you persuaded the person who made it to voluntarily give it to you -- by offering the iPhone producers something they preferred more than hanging on to the iPhone you wanted: your money.
If you don't own an iPhone, but you are glad the thing has been produced and only wish you had enough money to afford it -- and you have no intention of stealing the money in order to afford it -- then I am not talking to you. If, however, you resent this situation; if you think there is something wrong with the fact that whoever chooses to produce a thing owns that thing, and is entitled to retain ownership of that thing until someone persuades him voluntarily to part with it; if you don't think it's fair that someone gets to be rich just because he was able to think up the iPhone, while you weren't able to -- then you are envious, I AM talking to you, and I am describing a matter of fact. An extreme and accurate fact.
I submit that many people will destroy evidence of their own relative incompetence even at the price of wrecking their own lives. They would willingly give up cars and walk to work if they never again had to see a single billionaire chauffered to his private jet in a Bentley. They would smash every iPhone if in return they received a guarantee that everyone else was just as miserable as they were.
I further submit that this motive animates every regulation of business. It is pure resentment that some people are productive and talented enough to provide products and services so valuable that many people are willing voluntarily to pay for them -- and that these producers grow rich as a result of their own competence, effort, and merit.
