I managed to skate through college without strolling into the Waldo Library until the last week of my senior year. Thus, I managed to complete a very fine public school education and a mediocre (by my own making) college education without having come into contact with Ayn Rand's monumental "Atlas Shrugged." In fact, I successfully completed college without having heard of it. I read a great deal of other, weighty tomes. "The Brothers Karamazov," for instance.
A few years ago, a fellow I had met was raving on about how "Atlas Shrugged" was the most important book he'd ever read. How it was such a signal truth about society. Okay, so I was influenced by how how I thought the guy was, so I picked up a copy of the book and read it. All 1400+ pages of it. I read it right through to the end, and thought as I closed the back cover "What a piece of self-indulgent crap."
Many young men read this work, and figure that they point of Ayn's Rant is the government and economic structure of the United States. It's not. Ayn was a child of the Eastern Block (for those of you who remember,) and her work was a rant about centralized economic planning and monolithic bureaucracies of the Soviet Union.
A great number of people don't do their homework on this point. Including Allen Greenspan, who, as it turns out, was ministering to our nation's economic condition using the premises of Ayn's Rant - all regulation is bad, and true, unfettered capitalism will always self-correct.
Somehow that hasn't worked out so well for us. And, the unfettered capitalists have run to the protection of the State, while those oppressed workers become further downtrodden and further disenfranchised.
It's funny, but as I remember the book and the story, the wealthy (who toiled not, neither did they sow) were living off the largesse of the State.
That being the case, isn't it then true that Ayn's Rant, when applied to the real world, has brought about the very condition that Ayn ranted against?
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