Abusing the Signal

Funny.

Adam Kirsch reviews Anne C. Heller's new Ayn Rand biography in this weekend's Book Review. His piece offers this nugget about John Galt's long radio address in the novel Atlas Shrugged:

A Random House editor told Rand that "if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt's oration."

Kirsch calls the agreement a "sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing," observing that "giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist . . . would have done."

But Rand's decision to exchange money — a portion of her royalties — for extra paper is capitalism at work. Rand bought something that had financial value to her: the ability to disseminate her idea in the form she desired.

Without such an elegant capitalist mechanism through which to make this trade, the alternative solution would have been messy and unsatisfying. Rand would have had to give up part of Galt's speech or try to find a new publisher.

Well, when you want solid expertise on the economics of publishing tedious unreadable right-wing bullshit nobody would ever pay for straight-up on the actual market even if they were drunk or insane or threatened at gunpoint, where else would you go but the National Review?

Comments

[aimai]

She gave up *seven percent* of her royalty claims in exchange for a the Publisher giving her a few cents worth of extra pages per book? I don't know what it says about Rand as a capitalist, but she's a hell of a bad bargainer. There's simply no way that the marginal cost of adding the pages she wanted would have amounted to 7 percent of her royalties. She was an intensely stupid woman, and her publishers were pretty smart. I'm suprised they didn't try to get her to sign over all the royalties. Sounds like she would have gone for it. Its basically a vanity press situation.

aimai

[Caliph Garrett]

Rand bought something that had financial value to her: the ability to disseminate her idea in the form she desired

What does this even mean? Is there any way she could possibly capitalize that 7-cent-per-copy loss, even abstractly?

[Davis]

aimai: it was 7 cents per copy, not 7% of royalties, but your point is still spot on.

That radio address much have been one long, tedious, piece of drivel.

[aimai]

Yes, sorry, Davis is right. Seven cents a copy. Still pretty high, unless Galt's speech ran to fifty or so pages (which it may have). I think the more interesting thing, as alph Garrett points out, is the insistence of the NRO-nik that the only kind of value is "financial."

He wants to be making the argument that Rand got something of value to her in sacrificing mere lucre for the propagation of her ideas. And she may well have. But its not clear that what she got was of *financial* value, or that she even thought of the trade in those terms. I mean, there's ego gratification and self love at stake when a woman compares her turgid capitalist love story with the Bible and compares cutting part of it to destroying holy writ.

And there's nothing wrong with recognizing that there are lots of motivations out there besides the financial. But apparently NRO can't face admitting that, or it hasn't occured to them. The word "financial" is in that sentence because few other values are, well, valued, like the financial for these capitalist tools.

aimai

[aimai]

OK, the universe ate my very mportant comment. Davis is right, it was seven cents per book not seven percent of royalties. However, the book came out (hardcover) at 6.95. So seven cents a book was actually a pretty hefty price--one percent of the gross value of the book itself.

More important is the issue that Caliph Garrett puts up--what is the word " financial" doing in that sentence modifying "value?" Rand gave up some portion of the cash value of the book in order to gain something of value to her, sure, but it wasn't mere financial value. It was clearly ego gratification, delusions of grandeur, a desire to lecture the universe through her alter ego...lots of perfectly rsepectable motives there. But not mere financial motives. The book certainly didn't sell more copies with the added text. It might have sold less.

I'm not arguing that those motives can't co-exist with purely capitalist morality (never give a sucker an even break/buy low, sell high/etc...etc..etc...)but they aren't evidence of it. The issue seems to be that the NRO-nik guy doesn't have any way of talking about values affirmatively without assuming they are merely about money. He's right to point out that the original essay makes a silly point: Ayn Rand being willing to pay more than she had to for the right to have Galt bloviate on for pages and pages isn't proof that she was no mere capitalist. But her being willing to sacrifice financial advantage for ephemeral things like self gratification and the notion that her book was some kind of holy writ and herself the new madonna birthing it isn't proof that she was a devoted capitalist either.

aimai

[Josh Fulton]

Israeli forces storm into holiest place on earth

http://joshfulton.blogspot.com/2009/10/israeli-police-storm-jerusalems-holiest.html

[Caliph Garrett]

Also: why would anti-collectivist Galt use the radio spectrum--a public trust--to propagate his TL;DR objectivist blather?

Parasite.

Why not set up a LaRouche-Trotskyite print shop and airdrop leaflets over the country?

[R. Porrofatto]

I fail to see anything about this transaction that denotes "capitalism at work," no less "an elegant capitalist mechanism." The mere exchange of money for something of value -- in this case, paper -- pre-dates capitalism by a whole lotta centuries. But then this is Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute writing, for whom capitalism is the Life Force that ignited the Big Bang.

[Thers]

But her being willing to sacrifice financial advantage for ephemeral things like self gratification and the notion that her book was some kind of holy writ and herself the new madonna birthing it isn't proof that she was a devoted capitalist either.

Right -- and the joke is, nobody except the most devoted of her fans, and even few enough of those, has ever actually read that part of the book.

She thought the potboiler parts of the book would leave people panting for the dogma, but from a marketing perspective, got it precisely backwards.

Besides, as it turns out, "fuck you I got mine" is still "fuck you I got mine" even if you go on about it for 40 unreadable pages.

[Substance McGravitas]

Is it time for a call for donations at the NRO yet?

[El Gato Negro!]

So then, it's OK that outfits like the Washington Times and Nationalists in Review are in the red, year after year, generating no profits and needing huge amounts of wingnut welfare, because the Sacred Saintess of "Fvck you, I've got mine" did it too?

Caray! There is no principle, even the conservative 1st commandment -- Thou shalt have no other gods before the almighty dollar -- that they won't toss aside when it suits them.

Moral relativism looks positively rigid next to this sort of thinking.

[my valuable hunting knife]

I just find the NRO's veneration of Rand entertaining, given WFB's seething (and not-so-subtly Antisemitic) disdain for the woman. His essay on her death Ayn Rand, RIP, I think, was particularly vituperative.

[actor212]

Well, when you want solid expertise on the economics of publishing tedious unreadable right-wing bullshit nobody would ever pay for straight-up on the actual market even if they were drunk or insane or threatened at gunpoint, where else would you go but the National Review?

Reason Magazine?

[actor212]

But then this is Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute writing, for whom capitalism is the Life Force that ignited the Big Bang.

Veiled sexual reference.

[robert]

aAtWqH http://j8Jw83mNs0doPpsqvjrcns5.info