Ayn Rand Comes To Life In 9 More Days!

In the past few months, my business partner and I have been tossing Ayn Rand's name around a lot. We both see the evolving governmental reaction to our recent and current economic challenges as beginning to resemble all too-closely Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged.'

We are not alone.

In Friday's Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore voiced all my fears, and then some. Like my partner and I, he first thought it really couldn't happen now, like this.

But Moore recounts the book's tale of governmental seizure of the ownership of Hank Reardon's new metal for 'the public good,' comparing it to Hank Paulson's mandatory purchase by Treasury of stakes in America's largest banks.

He also pokes fun at various real names of Federal programs- "Emergency Economic Stability Act," "Auto Industry Financing and Restructuring Act," and, now, the New Messiah's own "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan"- for sounding like the book's "Anti-Greed Act" and "Equalization of Opportunity Act."

It's a little too scary to be laughing at, isn't it?

After all, the First Rookie's nattering about paying higher taxes to help unskilled waitresses 'just because,' is precisely the kind of baseless socialism of which Rand warned. Appropriating assets and revenues from you and me because we may have talent and work with it to earn our own rewards. When the President-elect frowns on that, and, instead, tells you it's your solemn duty to pay more taxes simply to enrich the less-fortunate, we're surely on the brink of Rand's novel as reality.

Moore points out how liberals hounded Rand and her book from its publication, but, he writes,

"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."

Further, the current president of the Atlas Society, David Kelley, says there are now plans to make the book into a major motion picture.

Too bad Coop is dead and can't reprise his work in "Fountainhead."

Moore ends his piece by quoting Kelley,

"We don't need to make a movie out of the book. We are living it right now."

Thank God it ends on an upbeat note, albeit after much national pain and suffering.