From the trial...
The newspapers had snarled that the cause of the country's troubles, as this case demonstrated, was the selfish greed of rich industrialists; that it was men like Hank Rearden who were to blame for the shrinking diet, the falling temperature and the cracking roofs in the homes of the nation; that if it had not been for men who broke regulations and hampered the government's plans, prosperity would have been achieved long ago; and that a man like Hank Rearden was prompted by nothing but the profit motive. This last was stated without explanation or elaboration, as if the words "profit motive" were the self-evident brand of ultimate evil.
If that isn't directly out of today's headlines, I'm not sure what could be.
As to the trial being out of today’s headlines, I think we’ve actually gone beyond this by now. The bankers who I would normally have put as the “victim” recently were actually well in cahoots with the government in terms of taking advantage of items such as the Community Reinvestment Act and securitization to make profits, but I wouldn’t call that productive. Same with the automakers. They have gone along with all the government regulations in order to make money in the short term, but I’d feel better about them if they didn’t take government money and made the cars that made them money, rather than those that allowed them to be in compliance of CAFE standards.
A Reardon-like action on the part of the car companies would be to push the high-profit vehicles like SUVs and Pickup Trucks (the cars that Americans REALLY want) and tell the government to shove it when they are forced to make the cars the government wants them to make. Go ahead and fine us if you must, but we’re going to build what the market says we must build.
On the banker side of things, it’s hard to see much difference between government and bankers these days since they move back and forth between private and public sectors so freely.
I know it’s much easier to draw a clear distinction in fiction, but I’m not seeing a lot of clear-cut distinction in real life these days. Maybe it’s because our companies have gotten so big that there are too many stockholders which have to be answered to on a quarterly basis, not allowing for a strong executive to behave like Reardon here. If I see a company run by someone like him, I’ll buy their products.