The Prescience Of Atlas Shrugged

In order to get my myself in the right mindset for the tea parties that I planned on attending, I checked out Atlas Shrugged from the library and started to reread it. Being as it was over 1100 pages long and I got distracted by Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, I didn’t finish it until Sunday.

I was going to do a review, but Bruce Webster at And Still I Persist posted one last Friday, so I will just link to his and add a few comments of my own.

I pretty much agree with everything Mr. Webster says. The characters are very one-dimensional. The heroes are incredibly competent and focused and the villains are weak, whiny, and duplicitous. The book is full of speeches and could use a great deal of trimming. I admit, I skimmed through the huge John Galt speech at the end.

Despite the flaws, I still found the book very compelling… and very depressing. The way the economic situation is described seems eerily similar to what I see happening now. The book starts in an economic slump caused by government mismanagement. Each step taken by the government to fix the economy involves government seizing more and more control of said economy. Each step then results in driving more and more productive people out of the economy, making things progressively worse. By the end of the book, civilization has been destroyed by bureaucrats who kept saying they were fixing things.

Some things that struck me when I was reading the novel:

• Elected government officials have almost no place in the book. I think one or two are shown, but that is about it. The government officials are all appointed regulators whose power has been delegated to them via the legislature. Instead of laws, there are “directives.” The Constitution is only mentioned once, at the very end of the novel.

  Compare that to the real world today. The Treasury Secretary, via TARP, has been given vast powers to fix/control/regulate banks and other institutions. There are also over a dozen or so “tsars”. Unelected and unapproved by congress, they are being used to “fix” various aspects of the economy. Currently, they don’t have much power compared to the various cabinet secretaries, but I still find the trend worrisome.

• The various people who are all destroying the economy are continually talking about “fairness” and preventing “destructive competition.” They never seem to talk about effectiveness or the benefits of competition. By trying to prop up failing businesses with government bailouts and regulations, they end up destroying the productive businesses.
• The directives and regulations are so confusing, no one can actually tell what is legal or isn’t. One of the characters in the book actually says that is the point – the rules are designed so you have to break them and then they can use the threat of punishment to control you.

One last note – one of the best speeches in the book, Francisco d’Anconia’s exhortation on the benefits of money, has been posted in various places around the web and is worth reading.