My Actifit Report Card: 八月 28 2018

Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged depicts a world where freedom and free markets are crushed by not-so-well-meaning politicians and bureaucrats. The story is a blueprint for the creation of a command economy where prices, wages, and production are dictated by bureaucratic apparatchiks. Like all regimes seeking autocratic power, the outcome, as she chillingly reveals, is cronyism, corruption, economic depression, and the rise of dictatorship.

The lesson of the book is that prosperity is driven by entrepreneurs and capital. And, you need freedom and free markets to achieve it. This system is called free market capitalism. Rand’s plot twist: what would happen if all the entrepreneurs, the drivers of a dynamic economy, went on strike. She takes the ideals of socialism, where business is dictated by government mandate “for the benefit of workers and the people”, to its logical, destructive end. The strike accelerates the collapse of society and the strikers re-emerge to rebuild society. It was a story that Rand knew well, being a Russian émigré fleeing Bolshevik terror.

Unfortunately, the book has become disturbingly prophetic.

Walking