'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

Even the off-hand pop culture references are crapulous: "A Confederacy of Dunces" surely counts as a "classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie", and it is a lot funnier than anything Ayn Rand ever wrote.

The appropriation of Rearden metal by the government in Atlas Shrugged was compared to Hank Paulson's insistence that the banks (which the government would bail out) had to hand over a percentage of their future profits back to the government. Apparently, these situations are eerily similar because in both cases the government did it for the "public interest".

Notwithstanding the fact that in Atlas Shrugged, Rearden actually invented something of value (which the govt appropriated), whereas in real life, the bankers fucked up their own balance sheets and were coming to the government cap in hand for help. As far as I'm aware, one is theft, the other is repaying a favour.

The only thing eerily similar about these two situations is that they both have a guy named Hank involved.

The idea that unbridled self interest leads to the greatest good guided Greenspan's monetary policy and got us into this mess.

There is certainly a lot to be said for enlightened self interest and personal freedom, but the absolutism of objectivism is just as wrong as communism.

1. Humans hate inequality, esp. those who are on the losing end, but it seems to make everyone unhappier in general. Inequality is useful, but probably needs some managing.

2. Massive wealth generated in modern societies, though it tends to fall into the hands of a few (exponentially so), is generated by having a society/collective. If you have more wealth than you could ever generate with your own two hands, then you're benefitting from society in a major way, regardless of how much society takes back. (Even this is not strictly true--what you can generate with your own two hands depends on education, inventions society has given to you (like language), etc. It's hard to calculate one's debt to society.)

By the way, this guy needs to pull out his copy of the book, or at least the Cliff's Notes, on a few counts. Notably, the appropriation of Rearden Metal was hardly immediate.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/

Maybe this is just a veiled promo?

> Then [John Galt] went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to "stop the motor of the world," to kill 90% or so of Earth's population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding every other competent engineer or manager in the US and persuading them to be just as selfish as him, just as unwilling to pay back or protect their country; he declared a covert "strike of the mind," as he called it. He hid them all in a secretive compound in the Rocky Mountains, protected by force field and invisibility cloak, and waited for the US economy to collapse, which, obligingly, it did -- because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads that made it possible for fuel and seeds to make it from the coastal cities to inland farms, and make it possible for food grown on inland farms to make it to the coastal cities. And as chaos was breaking out, he and his fellow inventors hijacked every radio transmitter in the US to broadcast his manifesto: You all deserve to die, for asking us to pay you back even one nickel, because we are all so selfish we don't consider any of the things you all paid for out of your taxes and that you did with your labor to have been at all helpful to us as entirely self-sufficient brilliant inventors and managers. So die.

> And that's where the series is interrupted. But from where the third book picks up, and by applying a little common sense, we can outline the main plot points, if not the characterizations, from the untitled middle volume, the one I'm whimsically calling Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder. When the previous book ran out, America was winding down to what was clearly going to be the last harvest, ever, and the Strikers were planning for the day that they, as the only people possessing any high tech or any capability of mass production of food or anything else, would ride out of their hidden Colorado fortress as humanity's saviors. They were pledging to themselves to build a new world based, as John Galt's manifesto had promised all Americans, on the virtue of selfishness. They assumed that a grateful (or at least desperately needy) and vastly reduced in number population would welcome them as liberators, chastened and having learned their lesson. Except that we know from the third book that that's not what happened, and anybody who knows human nature should have been able to predict that.

> Outside the valley, the conversion to local subsistence farming and the work of scavenging the dead cities for any usable metal would have been rough. No time or energy would have been available to save even minimal technology. We're looking at a collapse all the way back to (at best) early iron age levels, maybe even all the way back to the bronze age, and nobody will even have time to teach the next generation to read and write. But one thing very clearly did happen, in every survivor's village, and became world-wide policy as soon as even minimal travel and communication made it possible for the chiefs of the scattered villages of survivors began to reunite society into any kind of a civilization, and that is a fierce determination to make sure that the next generation remembered who had done this to them, and why they had done it. They would have educated their children to remember the names and descriptions of every one of the hated Strikers who had personally murdered four and a half billion people for a political point. And they would have educated their children that one idea, one idea in the Strikers' twisted minds, had lead to those four and a half billion deaths, the greatest act of genocide in human history: selfishness. How far did they go to eradicate selfishness? They went so far as to eradicate the first person pronoun from the language.

> Anthem is actually the best book of the three. And it's a credit to Rand that she realized just how monstrous the real results of the Strike would be. Many, many so-called Objectivists and Libertarians, who only read the first book, thought they were supposed to cheer for the Strikers, believed the Strikers' personal delusion that the Strike, and the resulting mass genocide, would usher in a techno-libertarian paradise on earth. No, in Anthem we get a view of John Galt's Earth from the viewpoint of someone who grew up in the next generation, never having known a technological world, knowing only a world in which selfishness is labeled the ultimate sin. http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/393124.html

> "Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism..."

I'm sorry, I thought it was capitalism that just fudged the butter causing this economic crisis. I mean there was the whole mortgage deal (that only happened in the largely non-socialist US) that started screwing the economy up because the US doesn't have enough legal protections in place to stop people who physically don't have the money to pay a loan to get a loan in the first place. I mean there used to be the day in the US where if you had no money you'd get a credit check and then be refused like everywhere else in the world.

The subprime mortgage fiasco caused the big swathe of mortgages defaulting. Basically this made the banks need to get their money back or face bankruptcy, then the NYSE went down the crap hole, gas went through the roof and then the mixture of shit vehicles, crappy prices, high gas price/low mileage and big debts caused chaos for the big 3 automakers in the US.

I'm sorry, but correct me if I'm wrong, but that little summarization (essentially thanks to wikipedia) never once mentioned a country other than the largely non-socialist US.

The US's major butter fudging caused all the economic problems in the more socialist countries like the UK. The funny thing is, is that if the US had nationalised health care (like the UK) they would pay approximately half what they currently do for health care and would result in them being twice as healthy. Ironically this would mean more americans would have more money to spend and would have less reasons to not spend it, which is exactly what the economy needs right now.

On the side of Ayn Rand's background, she came from soviet Russia, which completely fucked up the whole socialism thing by preventing anyone losing a job or being unemployed. They avoided buying combine harvesters for farms because it would make some people unemployed not realising that those very people would become reemployed in other jobs... like fixing the combine harvesters.

Now I have a cute little pet bunny balled up in a blanket in between my legs whom, much like me, cares little about Atlas Shrugged and any misconceived links to the current financial crisis and he only cares that the prices of his food and hay and treats have all gone up a couple of dollars thanks to the US.

But meanwhile, in Fantasyland ...

It defies parody that a Rand protege (Greenspan) and Rand supporters like Moore basically created this mess.