The ones who got us into the economic mess we're in thought Atlas Shrugged was a primer for modeling a society--rather than just a work of (bad) fiction. Their solution to the problems they caused? Read Atlas Shrugged...

It is no small irony that conservatives, whose agenda is supposedly to make us all to live in the past, don't remember what the past was actually like. Take, for example. the sudden interest amongst the "Whiny Right" in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Lately, conservative pundits have been bringing up this book as a prescient window from the past into today's economic predicament. According to them, if we only followed the precepts Rand laid out in this book, the real source of our economic problems would just go away, and we would have a perfect laissez-faire capitalist society run by selfish people who only give a damn about themselves. And that, of course, would be good (according to them), because all of those outside of that group of people are just "moochers" who unjustifiably take the "wealth" these people produced (i.e., from the Ponzi schemes and the tangled mazes of fabricated fictional financial instruments they created).

There's just one problem with this sudden rise in cheerleading for Ayn Rand from the Whiny Right: Rand's doctrine was what these people followed during their stay in power over the course of the last thirty years! We did follow those precepts, and this is where they got us.

Even before Obama was sworn into office, the Whiny Right was already posturing about their love of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article back in January entitled Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years. He mentioned that during his stay at the Cato Institute (a libertarian spin farm posing as an "objective"--no pun intended--source of economic wisdom, with a bias against economic regulation as deep as the Institute for Creation Science's bias against evolution), they would call those who hadn't yet read Atlas Shrugged "virgins". (Perhaps this was meant to indicate that they hadn't yet been mindf--ked.) Moore opined that "if only Atlas were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster." But in stereotypical conservatives-can't-remember-the-past fashion, he forgets that the book was "required reading" for people like Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan, who might be considered the... shall we say architects (Howard Roarks?) of the economic debacle we are in today. In other words, reading Atlas Shrugged is not what will get us out of this mess, it is the very thing that got us into it.

(Of course, when Moore appeared on The Colbert Report during the "Doom Bunker" segment last week, he admitted that if something, somehow, were to prove that his ideas on economic policy and doctrine were wrong, "I would have to rethink everything I believe in." As Colbert noted, we can only pray that never happens... but there really isn't any need to when dealing with Whiny Right, is there?)

To use a metaphor of sorts, imagine that an expatriate from a foreign country--say, Russia--detested how food was made in her native country, had her own ideas about such things (for argument's sake, we'll call her "Rachel Raynd") and fled to come to America. Once here, she wrote a cookbook (entitled "Atlas Sauteed") describing the "right" way that food should be made, complete with recipes and photos of her completed creations. Millions of people bought the book (and also bought large SUVs and/or pickup trucks in order to carry the huge tomes back home), and praised it. The pictures inside the book "proved" that these were great magnificent delicious recipes. But when several prominent chefs decided to serve food based on the recipes in the book, thousands of people suffered severe food poisoning and became extremely ill. Not heeding these somewhat obvious warnings, the chefs continued to prepare food according to these recipes, and many more became ill. When a government agency ("No, no, please no!!!!") came in and shut down the establishments using these recipes, the proprietors became enraged--"Why are WE being punished because other people got sick?"--and announced their idea of a solution. There was a cure for what befell all those sick people. Where would we find this cure? Why, in the back of that same cookbook! (In fact, in the last 60 or so pages, in which chef Jean Gaulte decries the notion that the illness of the people he fed is his concern--these, after all, were not productive people who created meals, these were simply the people who paid for and ate them. Mere human beings, not chefs like him!)

What is the allure of this book? Rand is a horrific author, even more tediously verbose than... well, than me. :-) Her capabilities in constructing an engaging narrative and producing poetic metaphor are severely limited. (How much "metaphor" can you squeeze out of "A = A"?) Her philosophy is derivative and unoriginal, and most of those she cribs from would spin in their graves if exposed to her work. And that philosophy is not conveyed to us through action (as a good author would do) but through plodding speeches offered up by her flawless heroic fictional characters.

So why do conservatives see this book as a bible, a primer on how society should be organized? Perhaps it is the same set of factors that leads fans of Lord of the Rings (et al) to show up to movie premieres (or for that matter, to work) in full costumed regalia, to take on the names of their favorite characters... in other words, these Randroids are just another set of nerds who believe their pet favorite fantasy fiction (which is all Atlas Shrugged is) is real! Good fantasy and science fiction work because their stories may be fictional, but they resonate metaphorically in the real world. Atlas Shrugged simply pretends that the fantasies of the author are reality. It is a pathetic eugenic fiction vainly attempting to rationalize the notion that society can be divided up into productive people and "moochers", and that only members of the former group are "deserving".

Isn't it funny how the advocates of this philosophy all happen to imagine themselves, objectively of course, to be the productive, intelligent ones who are taken advantage of by the other worthless moochers who just don't work as hard as they do? How did that happen?)


Poking fun at Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Stephen Colbert's segment on the subject last night, Rand Illusion, was dead on, mocking the book's ridiculous conceit about the "people who make society work" (you know: the CEOs, the hedge fund managers, the politicians, and the pundits) going on strike and creating their own island nation--a nation, as Colbert describes it, "of self-interested, Type-A, me-firsters who will never suffer the indignity of working in the interests of anyone else". Matt Ruff also parodied Rand's philosophical ideas in his book Sewer, Gas, and Electric.

But the most poignant mockery of Randroidism comes from Douglas Adams, best known as the author of the five-book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy". In one of those books, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Adams describes a race from the planet Golgafrincham, who had a similar idea to the one in Atlas Shrugged, only in reverse. They decided their species could be divided up into three groups: the "A" group being the brilliant (self-proclaimed, of course) leaders, scientists, artists and so on, the "C" group being those who worked, who did and made actual concrete things of value, the "B" group being everybody else--the hairdressers, management consultants, TV producers, insurance salesmen, telephone sanitizers, etc.--whom the wise "brilliant" people objectively deemed useless. And the brilliant people "invented spurious tales of impending doom" conveyed to the masses leading to an announcement that everyone would need to leave the planet, and that the three designated groups would be gathered onto their own respective "arks", with the "B-Ark" leaving... er, shall we say, "first". Thus the remaining people of Golgafrincham, having "rid themselves of the useless third of their population, ... stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich, happy lives... until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone."

Maybe such a scenario, or a variation of it, really is in our best interests. Perhaps, if the self-proclaimed brilliant deserving people did go on strike, did stop inventing specious manufactured ways of "creating wealth" from vapor, we would be the better for it. And perhaps if they did go off together to an island and form their own nation based on their social and economic "principles"... it would be the best season of Survivor ever!

But if they bring their guns with them, it probably wouldn't last more than a few episodes.