Now Online: ‘America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business’

ARI is proud to announce that it has made arrangements with publishers to make Ayn Rand’s article “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” available for the first time in online form.

The article was originally delivered as a lecture at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston in December 1961 and then published in Rand’s anthology Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in 1966. But the D.O.J.’s recent persecution of one of the greatest producers of the twenty-first century, Google, makes this article as relevant as ever. It is a powerful demonstration of the usefulness and uniqueness of Objectivist philosophy.

Rand’s article, among other things, focuses on the injustice of horrifying antitrust cases that targeted a handful of highly productive individuals, one of which even resulted in the suicide of a businessman. In the 1945 case against Aluminum Company of America, for example, the court ruled that ALCOA unlawfully maintained a monopoly. In his decision, Judge Learned Hand wrote that “[ALCOA] insists that it never excluded competitors; but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization.” Rand cites this as a clear example of “penalizing of ability for being ability.”

Wielding a philosophical scalpel, Rand cuts through the thick layers of prejudice, misconception, and confusion that help men like Hand rationalize this punishment of ability. One of these rationalizations is that a businessman’s great ability gives him the “power” of a king or tyrant. Bromides like “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat” strengthen this notion. But, as Rand identifies in the article, this is an equivocation between political and economic power.

Economic power, she argues, is the ability to create and offer values for voluntary exchange with others. It is a badge of honor, not a threat. Political power, by contrast, is the power to destroy by force. If it is used to violate individual rights, it is a mark of Cain. Equivocating the two along with other statist premises led, according to Rand, to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, “the turning point on the road to the ultimate destruction of American industry.”

Rand finishes the article with a warning: “Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. . . . If and when they perish, civilization will perish.”

Find a passage from the beginning of the article below.

If a small group of men were always regarded as guilty, in any clash with any other group, regardless of the issues or circumstances involved, would you call it persecution? If this group were always made to pay for the sins, errors, or failures of any other group, would you call that persecution? If this group had to live under a silent reign of terror, under special laws, from which all other people were immune, laws which the accused could not grasp or define in advance and which the accuser could interpret in any way he pleased—would you call that persecution? If this group were penalized, not for its faults, but for its virtues, not for its incompetence, but for its ability, not for its failures, but for its achievements, and the greater the achievement, the greater the penalty—would you call that persecution?

If your answer is “yes”—then ask yourself what sort of monstrous injustice you are condoning, supporting, or perpetrating. That group is the American businessmen.

The defense of minority rights is acclaimed today, virtually by everyone, as a moral principle of a high order. But this principle, which forbids discrimination, is applied by most of the “liberal” intellectuals in a discriminatory manner: it is applied only to racial or religious minorities. It is not applied to that small, exploited, denounced, defenseless minority which consists of businessmen.

You can read the rest here.