Ayn Rand’s logic isn’t any better than her polemics

To buy into Atlas Shrugged (first part of this post here, by the way), you have to buy into some Randian axioms:
•The government is completely incompetent. It doesn’t produce anything, it can’t accomplish anything, including scientific research, except leaching off the ubermenschen who run corporate America.
•Corporate America, by contrast, is run by the best and the brightest, first-rate minds and visionaries, brilliant scientists and wonder-workers.
•If those ubermenschen CEOs walk away—going Galt, in the Randian term—the world will collapse.
Axiom #1: Robert Picardo, as the director of some government science institute, gloomily informs Dagny that if he were anything but a hack, he’d have disappeared along with all the other first-rate minds (curiously, we haven’t seen scientists disappearing in part one: Only executive, CEOs, rising corporate bureaucrats). And he implies the institute has no good intellects working there.
In the real world, government research is pretty awesome. The National Institute of Health does millions of dollars in basic drug research, which drug companies then adapt and get rich off. The Internet is based on a military project, DARPA. Lots and lots of tech has come out of the defense department and the space program and into the private sector. Hell, railroads—the glorious industry of Rand’s novel—relied massively on government support and land grants to get going.
In the real world, the government would offer billions to Rearden to get access to his miracle metal. Of course, he could turn them down, but just the offer would raise questions about Rearden’s proud independence and government’s utter opposition (as I said in the previous post, Rand’s big on absolute dichotomies).
Axiom #2: As I noted, the people Galt draws are overwhelmingly executives and business leaders, even bankers. The only scientist we see taken is the one trying to decipher Galt’s McGuffin super-technology. So why emphasize CEOs? I’m guessing (and on this bit I may be wrong) that Rand sees them as creators, scientists, engineers, like Rearden who invents a wonder metal alloy.
But they’re not. CEOs are managers. Executives. Managing people is a completely different skill set from inventing things (and I actually don’t mean that as an insult to managers). It’s possible to have both but it’s far from necessary and in large companies, much less common. From most business literature I’ve read over the years, promoting guys whose skills involve doing to a position requiring managing is often a mistake.
But acknowledging this would kill Rand’s vision of the executives of America as the vital essence of our culture. Which brings me to Axiom #3: Quite simply, executives walking away from the economy isn’t going to stop the motor of the world.
I know companies that have gone under because the manager walked away, but they’re mom and pop, boutique companies. Mega-corporations have succession plans in place. One guy dies, someone else steps in. If there’s no successor, no plans for someone to take over, it’s a badly-run company (look at the flap at Apple over what shareholders thought was a lack of concern for replacing Steve Jobs).
Consider the end of Part One: An oil executive announces he’s leaving his oil fields the way he found it. Only he’s not—he sets them on fire first. Esai Morales as a copper magnate in Part Two destroys his own mines and one of his shipping facilities.
That more-or-less acknowledges that if they had merely walked away—instead of destroying property that belongs to their shareholders and the corporation—(Morales seems positively gleeful that his stockholders will lose big) the company would have done fine. CEOs are actually dispensible, just as most professionals are (myself included: Any job I’ve walked away from, they’ve found someone to replace me).
So I don’t see going Galt as bringing America to its knees.