"God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it- for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started. There weren't many chiselers among us. We knew our jobs and we were proud of it and we worked for the best factory in the country, where old man Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country's labour. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn't an honest man left among us. That was the evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with, but you never thought to see it alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few bastards, but that it turned decent people into bastards, and there was nothing else that it could do- and it was called a moral ideal!
...
"What was it we were supposed to want to work for? For the love of our brothers? What brothers? For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around us? ... We had no way of knowing their ability, we had no way of controlling their needs- all we knew was that we were beasts of burden struggling blindly in some sort of place that was half-hospital, half-stockyards- a place geared to nothing but disability, disaster, disease- beasts put there for the relief of whatever whoever chose to say was whichever's need.
"Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt, for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family, for a paint job on their house- it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger.
taken from: <ATLAS SHRUGGED, Pg 611-612> <Part two: EITHER-OR> <ChapterX: The sign of the dollar>
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