| | Yes, right away we have to nod to the ones who are, so there is that. But the question remains. It is 50 years old, at least. Even within the pages of Atlas, our heroes had to suffer businessmen who thought that some regulations are necessary, you can't go to extremes, and they were happy to work for the public good. That last is the crux of the problem.
While it is useful to define money as a Crusoe Concept, the fact is that wealth is social. We use money to trade with each other. We get money by offering values to other people.
By definition, those who best get along well with others, who offer what other people want, who meet the most common needs benefit the most. The richest are those who are most common. They adhere to the common morality, endorse the common culture. Rich people are successfully constrained by the society they dominate.
Obviously, there are exceptions. The contradiction to all the "customer is right" malarky that dominates businesses run by managers is that no one asked for the invention of the television, the railroad, or smallpox vaccine. Someone with vision and integrity created them and brought them forward -- and not all were successful. Television, in fact, goes back to the 1890s or earlier, but as compelling as the idea was, the implementation was not commercially successful. The histories of the computer and automobile industries offer many examples of brilliant ideas that went nowhere, or good companies that went under. The marketplace is unforgiving. In order to be successful, you have to give most people what they mostly seem to want.
There are exceptions to the exceptions. Three new luxury airlines offer premium value for those willing to pay for it. That is diametrically opposed to the consensus view that profitability comes from jamming the most people in the smallest spaces and then seeking bankruptcy protection and concessions from the labor unions.
The managers of the suffering airlines are all successful, mainstream, middle of the road, popular, etc., etc., etc., and as their businesses fail, they nonetheless live well, specifically because they are, by definition, "normal" in and of the median, the mean, the mode, the norm. People like that usually are not Objectivists.
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