| | Joe Maurone in 14: Where would Howard Roark be without Roger Enright? Where Roark was the architect, he didn't know how to "sell" it, and needed an Enright to intermediate his work to the world; pity we don't see more of how Enright does that, as he is an "unsung hero."
Something of a one-man corporate conglomerate, Enright was more into the production spheres. It was Kent Lansing who was the salesman.
" Lansing is a salesman with a rare appreciation of artistic genius and an even rarer willingness to fight for it. ...
"Lansing describes himself as a salesman, and shows Roark the value of a middleman. [Most people] will not see the truth of the new ideas created by an innovator like Roark. They need to hear it from others. They need to hear it from a middleman — and the more middlemen the better. ... In the struggle that Lansing fights and wins, he demonstrates that independence and integrity are not the exclusive prerogative of the creative artist, but are sometimes possessed by the middleman, as well." ( See Cliffs Notes here.)
Peter Reidy in 15: A related point that I've noticed is that nearly all of Rand's business heroes deliver hard goods and services; nobody is a speculator, venture capitalist, futures trader or what have you. ... I think this lack of middlemen or salesmen is a dramatic matter. Rand had a story to tell and ...
I agree that even a monumental work such as Atlas Shrugged is a matter of selection. Ted Keer pointed to the character of Father Amadeus who was excised (or exorcised) from the final version. Steel and motors and the factories that use and make them are concretized values of the producers. Making Roger Marsh or Neal Hammond an investment banker would have done little if anything for the work. (Later, of course, Alan Greenspan wrote "The Assault on Integrity" for Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal.)
But I think that Fred in 19 in support of Reidy above gets closer to the truth:
I wonder if someone had ever explained Arbitrage to her, what she would have said?
The response I get is uniformly, 'You have to be kidding!'
It does not feel like "real" production. In Ayn Rand's day, people nominally at least reconciled their check registers against their bank statements. We don't do that anymore. So, most people have no way to conceptualize what it is that a venture capitalist or arbitrage trader or stock broker actually does.
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