We Are Living “Atlas Shrugged”

If you have yet to read Ayn Rand’s classic novel “Atlas Shrugged,” you really should find the time.

And it will be a great amount of time to get through Rand’s opus, which runs nearly 1,200 pages.

Don’t bother with the three-part movie series, which goes to great lengths to prove what academics had been saying all along – the book is unfilmable.

The three “Atlas Shrugged” movies used different actors to play the main characters, of necessity abridged much of the book’s content, and generally failed, to borrow a line from the movie “Slap Shot,” to capture the spirit of the thing.

Again, read the book. You will cringe at how Rand, writing the book published in 1957, could so accurately depict current events.

What Rand wrote was a tale of how a once-great industrial nation could be brought down by corrupt bureaucrats in government, by the dumbing down of the population, and by the penalizing of individualism and exceptionalism.

The drones among the populace in Rand’s book were described as “looters,” content to live off the productivity and creativity of others.

Worse, success was punished by governments, both in a confiscatory sense and also from the standpoint of looking to equalize competition by penalizing the strong companies to prop up the weak.

Rand’s United States in “Atlas Shrugged” was a patchwork of dying major cities, destitute small towns and collapsing infrastructure as evidenced by failing factories and railroads. It was a nation inhabited by people content to be wards of the government, which would provide for them by taxing the rich.

Supply chains were collapsing. Creative, innovative people found themselves increasingly unwilling to carry the load for all the looters.

Have you done any shopping recently and found bare sections of shelving staring back at you? Have you heard Clueless Joe Biden’s mouthpieces joking how we Americans have been spoiled by having choices at stores and should learn to deal with being a third-world nation?

Have you noticed how eager some of your neighbors were, and are, to sit back and collect government handouts rather than working?

Rand’s book was filled with bureaucratic gobbledygook such as the Anti-dog-eat-dog rule to subsidize unproductive railroads at the expense of those railroads that were efficient and solvent.

It’s not much different than the current “infrastructure” bill, which is long on spending on things such as climate, pension funding, illegal immigrants and environmental issues and short on putting money toward traditional infrastructure such as roads, airports and various utilities such as electric power or water.

You can call it “infrastructure” but that doesn’t make it infrastructure spending.

To avoid spoiling Rand’s ending, I will say only that it is a bit contrived in its details. But it is all too accurate in the concept that the more producers are punished and malingerers are rewarded, the fewer producers you will have.

I have read some learned observers speculate that the liberals must be intent on destroying this nation. There can be no other explanation for the ridiculous path on which they are and have been attempting to steer us.

Current events increasingly are indicating they are succeeding. If you can’t wait to witness the end game firsthand, read “Atlas Shrugged.”