Free I Am John Galt by Donald Luskin, Andrew Greta Page B

government intervention, socialism, in addition to real competitors, and so we ought to be kindred spirits,” explains Rodgers. “And yet when you interact on certain things with those CEOs, you see horrible things happening. They’re trying to lock Honda out of the United States for chrissake, because they can’t make cars well enough. They’re going to Washington to get their fair share of the pork.”
    Over the years Rodgers realized that the vast majority of his fellow CEOs traveled a distinctly different arc to achieve their positions of power. He has very little in common with them. Rodgers built his business through entrepreneurial effort, using his considerable mental power to dissect the very substance of nature down to the atomic structure of silicon itself and then used that knowledge to bring new value into physical creation.
    Most other CEOs rose through the ranks of giant bureaucracies by playing politics, currying favor, building a power base, and not rocking the boat. “The statist businessman wins by using the state to gain competitive advantage,” Rodgers once wrote. “His perks—corporate jets, limos, lavish expense-account dinners—are the rewards for climbing the ladder.” 4 Their primary focus is on holding on to the power and perks of office even at the expense of their own companies.
    By contrast, Rodgers flies coach. He has no time for corporate power struggles. He’s focused on creating competitive products in the fast-changing world of high technology against a constantly changing field of hungry start-ups and international competitors. “They aren’t your buddies and they aren’t your kindred spirits,” Rodgers finally concluded about many of his fellow CEOs. “They have the same title as you and that’s it. And over the years, you find out that there are only a few real free-market capitalists who happen to be CEOs, very few.”
    Perhaps the sharpest example for T.J., and the one that seems to rankle him the most, was the spawning of a consortium called SEMATECH (Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology). Billed as a “bold experiment in industry-government cooperation,” 5 the very description sounds like socialist propaganda to Rodgers’s ears—pure anathema to his core beliefs in free-market competition.
    In 1987, the U.S. semiconductor industry was facing tough competition from Japanese chip makers who, according to Rodgers, operated well-run companies in a benign corporate environment with a good tax policy. Instead of upping their game to compete head-on, 14 U.S. technology companies, including big names like Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and Texas Instruments, formed SEMATECH and went crying to Washington for help against the supposedly unfair Japanese threat. After the heavyweight consortium played the national security card by claiming that our military would be detrimentally impacted if the U.S. semiconductor industry were harmed, the government eagerly ponied up $100 million a year in subsidies for the group. 6
    It was more than double Cypress Semiconductor’s revenues that year. Rodgers wanted nothing to do with it. He likened the group to “General Motors trying to become more efficient by having a centralized fin-design department.” 7 His public denouncement and refusal to play along with industry leaders in their conspiracy to sucker the American people earned him an outsider’s reputation. Or as he puts it with an air of subdued pride, “Well, ‘bad boy’ of course is walking away from free government money.”
    From the Gridiron to Silicon Valley
    It’s hard to imagine a more genuine American success story. T.J.’s father was literally the son of a sharecropper who farmed cotton in Alabama during the Great Depression. He was in ninth grade before he got his first pair of shoes. He never graduated from high school. The day after Pearl Harbor he left