See, this is why egoism makes way more sense than objectivism as a selfishness-based philosophy.
In reality she would have sacked half of them without even being in the room and had them escorted out by the same security that protects her. Ain’t nobody getting anywhere near her with a guillotine.
She would mumble something about needing to streamline the company’s processes to remain competitive. Not to the workers, of course-- To a board of directors who are barely paying attention, other than making sure number goes up.
The workers would just be informed that half of them are no longer employed there.
Just one caveat - if you double production, you’re not doubling your income or profit.
I think the comic is supposed to be a lampooning of Ayn Rand’s philosophy… Not an accurate model of business considerations within a production based industry.
I mean you might be, depending upon what % of the total market you operate and what the exact inputs of the new method are.
No, you never will without increasing prices to cover the additional overhead of increased production.
Remember, only the machine is doubling efficiency, but operations has to increase to handle the new output and resources required.
Not if most of you cost is labor, you’ll be approaching marginal increase in costs but still certainly of double income.
But some operational costs (I.e. Ground Rent, Marketing, Legal Fees, IP Costs etc…) do not scale with increased output.
Nor does demand for your product.
That’s why the realistic outcome to this scenario is that she fires half her workforce there by maintaining the same level of production while also slashing labour costs.
Here is a link to the creator of the comic. And I really like this comic.
Thank you!
I’ve never met a person who was both into Ayn Rand and also rational.
I’ve read all the main books and think they’re fucking hilarious. Does that count?
Ayn Rand didn’t even like Ayn Rand,
not to say she was rational of course.
That sounds pretty rational of her.
I was into Ayn Rand in high school and in retrospect I guess I’d say that, given the things I thought were important, I was rational. But certainly my values weren’t quite…I dunno…human?
For the longest time I used to shelve Rand next to Marx on my bookshelf. I’ve read both at various points (might as well learn the source material if you’re going to argue about politics…), but it tickled me as a centrist to annoy their ghosts equally.
