Atlas is Shrugging

Stephan Moore at The Wall Street Journal on how America has been living the plot of a fifty-year-old novel:

Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that "Atlas Shrugged" parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. [And also many on the right, see the National Review]But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated "Atlas" as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible. [Emphasis added]

The current economic strategy is right out of "Atlas Shrugged": The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you. That's the justification for the $2 trillion of subsidies doled out already to keep afloat distressed insurance companies, banks, Wall Street investment houses, and auto companies -- while standing next in line for their share of the booty are real-estate developers, the steel industry, chemical companies, airlines, ethanol producers, construction firms and even catfish farmers. With each successive bailout to "calm the markets," another trillion of national wealth is subsequently lost. Yet, as "Atlas" grimly foretold, we now treat the incompetent who wreck their companies as victims, while those resourceful business owners who manage to make a profit are portrayed as recipients of illegitimate "windfalls."

Judith Apter Klinghoffer has more on the hatred of the good for being the good:

Unfortunately, Muslims and Arabs are not the only haters of the good, intellectual elites are too. Hence, the relentless media, NGO war against democracies as a whole and the US and Israel in particular. Therefore, the more democracies try to acceed to the demands of these "victims" and their self appointed advocates, the more they are hated.

We appear doomed to relive the 1930s, due to fools who cannot learn from the past.

Crossposted at The Dougout