Originally published on Atlas Shrugged: Fiat Motors.
Dwight Sanders: Man pig farming is easy, especially with this super tractor that I invented.
Cobra Commander: I'm not... tractors don't really have anything to do with pig farming.
Dwight Sanders: Well I mean... it's farming right? So... tractor.
Cobra Commander: Pig farming, actually scratch that, all farming is a time consuming and labor intensive process. When done by individuals without hired help it basically takes up all of your daily life to manage. Which is part of the reason I don't do it as I have more important things to do with my time, like conquering small countries.
Dwight Sanders: Well that's if you're a farmer. But seeing as we're captains of industry, with a super tractor I likely rent to everyone to use for a quarter because we're all so great at financing, we are obviously better farmers than people who have devoted their lives to farming.
Cobra Commander: You realize that there's more to farming that tractors right? Like a lot more? I mean the tractor tills and helps with a lot of other tasks but you still have to... build barns and silos and cultivate crops and harvest and store goods and deal with pest control and ... I mean I don't even know beyond that. Again I'm more the conquering type but even I know that to have a solid agricultural base for a community people can't just do it as a hobby.
Dwight Sanders: Yes but since this tractor is twice as fast as a regular tractor we've got plenty of time to knock through all the other stuff. Probably only takes like... what a lazy weekend.
Cobra Commander: Twice as fast? That... that is both impossible and it doesn't even make sense in the first place.
Dwight Sanders: Of course it's not impossible, I build airplanes, so obviously I can build tractors. Same thing.
Cobra Commander: Tractors are designed by companies who specialize in building tractors and have built tractors in competition with other tractor building companies since tractors have existed. They construct these tractors using factories specifically designed for making tractors! And you're implying that... just in your spare time you could have always designed a better tractor? And not just like some custom tractor but one that is literally twice as good as ones on the market? And sorry not just designed but built, by hand, using whatever you happened to have lying around?
Dwight Sanders: Of course. I own an airplane company.
Cobra Commander: Well you should have owned a tractor company! You are... you are the worst capitalist ever!
Dwight Sanders: I'm an amazing capitalist!
Cobra Commander: No you're not! Before you ever came here you were supposed to be fighting tooth and nail for profit, and here you could have built something that, acc ording to you, is basically a magic invention all by yourself and sold it for ludicrous profits but you never did because... why?
Dwight Sanders: Well I was... too busy... owning an airplane company.
Cobra Commander: But you also build and manage airplanes here, while pig farming. So clearly you had plenty of time to do something like this.
Dwight Sanders: Okay so maybe I just didn't know I could build an awesome tractor until pig farming, which again is very tractor dependent, taught me what I needed to know about farming.
Cobra Commander: Well that brings us back to the part that doesn't make sense. You're saying your tractor is twice as fast as an ordinary tractor but... tractors are built to go at low speeds.
Dwight Sanders: That's impossible! Everything is better if it's faster.
Cobra Commander: You can't till fields at 60 miles an hour you dolt!
Dwight Sanders: Clearly we do, because we're so good at farming we figured out that it was better to do it that way and everyone should have been doing that.
Cobra Commander: So your story is that, by hand with no assistance, you've maintained multiple aircraft, run a productive pig farm that services a small community, designed, constructed, maintained, and managed rentals for a super tractor that is better than any other tractor that companies devoted to making tractors have ever made while also still being a stupid idea because it does things no proper farmer would ever want a tractor to do, and even with all of that you have time to be all folksy and full of free time to kick back and enjoy life.
Dwight Sanders: Regular farmers must be just terrible people. It's the only logical explanation.
Cobra Commander: Somehow I feel like logic has done it's best to steer far, far away from this place. Also I'm stealing your super tractor.
Dwight Sanders: But you don't even like it!
Cobra Commander: It's not the profit of the crime, it's the principal of the thing! Namely that I hate you and I want you to be sad.