Atlas is Shrugging

"Atlas Shrugged" was written 50 some years ago, and yet it describes a country that in an eerie way resembles the United States of today. A country in which the officials in Washington decide what is right and wrong. A country in which those officials have a solution to every problem, which inevitably cause more problems which need solutions. A country in which every person is expected to contribute according to his ability, and everyone is in turn compensated according to his need. A country in which the productive are robbed of their wealth in order to support the lazy less productive.

I found it shocking how accurately Ayn Rand was able to describe the world we live in today. You see, I had bought into an evolutionary theory, the theory that things somehow always get better automatically; that if something new is discovered, if obviously couldn't have been discovered before. But as the wisest man once said, "There is nothing new under the sun". We are simply going through a cycle that has happened countless times in human history. Ayn Rand saw it happen in Russia where she was born in the early part of last century. I grew up believing that Russians were the polar opposite of Americans, but now I see we are actually made up of the same stuff, and we are heading down the same track they went down.

What drives a civilization? It is the innovators, the producers, the thinkers that have created and sustained the lifestyle we live. There was no government directive to caused Thomas Edison to invent the light bulb, or Henry Ford to develop the assembly line, or Eli Whitney to discover the principle of interchangeable parts. But today we are seeing big business spending many, many years (and federal R&D dollars) to develop that hydrogen car. We are seeing small business deciding that borrowing and expanding is just not worth the risk. We are seeing people who think they will be better off just staying in that lower tax bracket.

In Greek mythology, Atlas was the giant who carried the world on his shoulders. What would happen if he decided the load wasn't worth the bother? What if he shrugged? You know, I think that he is shrugging about right now.