Simon Black: Atlas Shrugged Goes Real Time

From the Sovereign Man’s prolific Simon Black (bold original)

“John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains—and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.”

Sick of the overbearing regulation, taxation, and entitlement mentality in society—in the book Atlas Shrugged, John Galt went to one entrepreneur after another to convince them that they just didn’t need to put up with it anymore.

They didn’t need to keep propping up a system that was trying to destroy them. Where’s the point in continuing to feed a parasitic system?

So one by one, these innovators and producers simply closed up shop, deciding to just “shrug” and abandon what they were providing thanklessly to the looters.

Today many companies are doing the same. They may not be abandoning their businesses altogether, but they are moving them out of the hands of the parasites by moving their tax bases abroad.

In Ayn Rand’s book, the Economic Planning Bureau dealt with this by legislating that no businesses could leave: “[a]ll the manufacturing establishments of the country, of any size and nature, were forbidden to move from their present locations, except when granted a special permission to do so.”

In real life today, we have a string of policies being proposed to similarly discourage companies from leaving, or failing that, to try to claw as much money as possible from them first.

First, take the H.R. 5278: No Federal Contracts for Corporate Deserters Act, which bars federal contracts for American companies that have gone overseas for tax purposes.

Then take the H.R. 5549: Pay What You Owe Before You Go Act, which seeks the seizure of unrepatriated corporate revenue.

Even the language used by these bill’s supporters is eerily similar to the novel, as politicians call for corporations to pay their “fair share” and bemoan that Americans have to “pick up the tax burden inverted companies shrug off.”

At the time, Rand might have thought that she was writing about an extreme, fictional society. But it seems that the Land of the Free is eager to exceed even her worst expectations.

When she wrote about the “Economic Emergency Law”, which forbade any discrimination “for any reason whatever against any person in any matter involving his livelihood”, she was likely thinking about criteria such as race, gender, and age.

She might have even considered they would try to prevent employers from making judgments based on a person’s ability, though I’m sure she would not have even imagined what politicians have actually come up with in the US.

Try the S. 1972/ H.R. 3972: Fair Employment Opportunity Act that proposed to prohibit discrimination according to a person’s history of unemployment.

Or even worse, the S. 1837: Equal Employment for All Act that would have prohibited employers from even looking at prospective employee’s credit ratings.

The literary similarities don’t just stop with corporations either. Compare the fictional Project Soybean, designed to “recondition” people’s dietary habits to the actual H.R. 4904: Vegetables Are Really Important Eating Tools for You (VARIETY).

Tell me, which one sounds more ludicrous to you?

With each new piece of legislation being proposed in the Land of the Free, Atlas Shrugged seems to be ever more prophetic.

While even the most terrifying elements of the book are coming true, so are the reactions.

People and companies are leaving, refusing the put up with the looting of their efforts any longer.

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: What Critics said in 1957

The LA Times makes a compilation of the critics of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus (fourth and last novel) “Atlas Shrugged” when it was first published in 1957. [italics mine]

Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times:

It is probably the worst piece of large fiction written since Miss Rand's equally weighty "The Fountainhead." Miss Rand writes in the breathless hyperbole of soap opera. Her characters are of billboard size; her situations incredible and illogical; her story is feverishly imaginative. It would be hard to find such a display of grotesque eccentricity outside an asylum.

Granville Hicks, New York Times

Not in any literary sense a serious novel, it is an earnest one, belligerent and unremitting in its earnestness. It howls in the reader's ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention, and then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds.

Edward Wagenknecht, Chicago Daily Tribune

There is much good sense in this book and it deserves more careful consideration than it is likely to get. For all that, Miss Rand is not quite the Moses to lead us out of the wilderness…. The worst thing in her book is her denunciation of what she calls mysticism, her ideas of which seem derived from Hitler rather than Meister Eckhardt or Rufus Jones. For her a mystic is a parasite in spirit and in matter, "a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others." No, Miss Rand, a mystic is a man who insists upon using those areas of his mind which you block off.

Helen Beal Woodward, Saturday Review

Miss Rand … throws away her considerable gifts for writing by fixing her reader with a glittering eye and remorselessly impressing upon him her convictions. These range from a hatred of Robin Hood as "the most immoral and the most contemptible" of all human symbols to a belief in a kind of chrome-plated laissez faire. Much of it is persuasive…. But Miss Rand is undone by her prolixity and her incontinence. She sets up one of the finest assortments of straw men ever demolished in print, and she cannot refrain from making her points over and over…. Altogether this is a strange, overwrought book.

Newsweek

Gigantic, relentless, often fantastic, this book is definitely not one to be swallowed whole. Throughout its 1,168 pages, Miss Rand never cracks a smile. Conversations deteriorate into monologues as one character after another laboriously declaims his set of values. One speech, the core of the book, spreads across 60 closely written pages. Yet once the reader enters this stark, strange world, he will likely stay with it, borne along by its story and its eloquent flow of ideas.

Paul Jordan-Smith, Los Angeles Times

A neighbor of mine who occasionally reviews books for an eastern magazine dropped in and, seeing the massive volume on my desk, asked what I thought of it. "Challenging and readable and quick with suspense," I replied…. "a book every businessman should hug to his breast, and the first novel I recall to glorify the dollar mark and the virtue in profit…." But how the shabby little left-wingers are going to hate it!

Donald Malcolm, the New Yorker

Apparently Miss Rand set out to write a novel of social prophecy, something like "Nineteen Eighty-Four." But while Orwell based his predictions upon the nature of the police state, the lady who gave us "The Fountainhead" has based hers upon — well, it is hard to say. Miss Rand's villains resemble no one I have ever encountered, and I finally decided to call them "liberals," chiefly because I can't imagine whom else she might have in mind. In her vision of the future, then, the liberals have brought the world to a sorry plight. America is plunged into a catastrophic depression, caused by the government's infernal meddling with the economy, and most of the other nations of the world have become People's States, whose inhabitants are actually grubbing up roots to keep themselves alive. The last sparks of industrial competence are concentrated in the minds of two dozen — at most — American businessmen, who manage to hold the globe aloft in spite of the best efforts of governments everywhere to bring it down.

Hedda Hopper, in her syndicated column

Ayn Rand, although born in Europe is one of the finest American citizens I know. She worked with John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Adolphe Menjou, Lela Rogers, Charles Coburn and a bunch of us when we formed the Motion Picture Alliance anti-commie group. She's author of "The Fountainhead," and has written a blockbuster of a book titled "Atlas Shrugged." It runs 1,168 pages, and you won't want to miss one word. I couldn't put it down, neither will you be able to once you've started reading. You'll say it can't happen here — but it's happening every day and we sit still while watching our rights as humans being whittled away.

Whittaker Chambers, National Review

"Atlas Shrugged" can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned "higher morality," which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world…. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.

Markets have validated Ms Rand rather than from most of these preachy critics—Atlas Shrugged sold over 7 million copies from 1957-2009 (hat tip Bob Wenzel)

Shows why mainstream 'expert' opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.

P.J. O’Rourke On Atlas Shrugged (Movie): A Hundred Years Spent Proving Classical Liberalism Right

Libertarian author P.J. O’Rourke reviews Atlas Shrugged The Movie (source Wall Street Journal Blog; bold emphasis mine)

But I will not pan “Atlas Shrugged.” I don’t have the guts. If you associate with Randians—and I do—saying anything critical about Ayn Rand is almost as scary as saying anything critical to Ayn Rand. What’s more, given how protective Randians are of Rand, I’m not sure she’s dead.

The woman is a force. But, let us not forget, she’s a force for good. Millions of people have read “Atlas Shrugged” and been brought around to common sense, never mind that the author and her characters don’t exhibit much of it. Ayn Rand, perhaps better than anyone in the 20^thcentury, understood that the individual self-seeking we call an evil actually stands in noble contrast to the real evil of self-seeking collectives. (A rather Randian sentence.) It’s easy to make fun of Rand for being a simplistic philosopher, bombastic writer and—I’m just saying—crazy old bat. But the 20^th century was no joke. A hundred years, from Bolsheviks to Al Qaeda, were spent proving Ayn Rand right.

Then there is the audacity of bringing “Atlas Shrugged” to the screen at all. Rand devotees, starting with Rand herself, have been attempting it for 40 years. The result may be as puzzling as a nude sit-in anti-Gadhafi protest in Tripoli’s Green Square, but you have to give the participants credit for showing up.

In “Atlas Shrugged” Rand set out to prove that self-interest is vital to mankind. This, of course, is the whole point of free-market classical liberalism and has been since Adam Smith invented free-market classical liberalism by proving the same point. Therefore trying to make a movie of “Atlas Shrugged” is like trying to make a movie of “The Wealth of Nations.” But Adam Smith had the good sense to leave us with no plot, characters or melodramatic clashes of will so that we wouldn’t be tempted to try.

Patching it all up, P.J. O’Rourke simply says that a hundred years had been spent proving classical liberalism right.

Coming Soon: Atlas Shrugged The Movie

(hat tip: Robert Wenzel)

Example of Unintended Consequences From Tax Hikes

As we earlier noted in Competitive Global Tax Structures As Major Investment Determinant, tax policies play a significant role in shaping an economic environment.

Here is an example how policymakers underestimates the public response to tax increases.

This from the Wall Street Journal, (all bold highlights mine)

``Illinois Governor Pat Quinn is the latest Democrat to demand a tax increase, this week proposing to raise the state's top marginal individual income tax rate to 4% from 3%. He'd better hope this works out better than it has for Maryland.

``We reported in May that after passing a millionaire surtax nearly one-third of Maryland's millionaires had gone missing, thus contributing to a decline in state revenues. The politicians in Annapolis had said they'd collect $106 million by raising its income tax rate on millionaire households to 6.25% from 4.75%. In cities like Baltimore and Bethesda, which apply add-on income taxes, the top tax rate with the surcharge now reaches as high as 9.3%—fifth highest in the nation. Liberals said this was based on incomplete data and that rich Marylanders hadn't fled the state.

``Well, the state comptroller's office now has the final tax return data for 2008, the first year that the higher tax rates applied. The number of millionaire tax returns fell sharply to 5,529 from 7,898 in 2007, a 30% tumble. The taxes paid by rich filers fell by 22%, and instead of their payments increasing by $106 million, they fell by some $257 million.

``Yes, a big part of that decline results from the recession that eroded incomes, especially from capital gains. But there is also little doubt that some rich people moved out or filed their taxes in other states with lower burdens. One-in-eight millionaires who filed a Maryland tax return in 2007 filed no return in 2008. Some died, but the others presumably changed their state of residence. (Hint to the class warfare crowd: A lot of rich people have two homes.)"

At the end of the day, when the society's productive agents get fed up by the sanctions imposed by the government to pay for profligacy, misdeeds or for the maintenance of the interests of bootlickers, the law of unintended consequences applies.

Others calls this "Atlas Shrugged"

Could Asians Be Assimilating On Western Free Market Ideals?

Asians now comprise as the fastest growing nationalities among foreign students in America.

That's according to the Economist, ``STUDENTS flock to American universities from all over the world. But according to the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, over 40% of the 106,123 foreign students in the country during the 2007-08 academic year came from just three Asian countries: China, India and South Korea. And the 23,779 Chinese students in America far outnumbered those from India and South Korea, which each sent just under 10,000 students to America. But over the period between 1997 and 2008 the number of Indian students grew the fastest. The European presence on American campuses has grown more slowly. But between them, Germany, France and Italy still sent more students to America in 2007-08 than either India or South Korea." (bold emphasis mine)

While the terse article doesn't dwell on the details of which schools Asian students were enrolled at and likewise doesn't tackle with the post graduate life of graduate foreign students (if they remain in the US or have been repatriated ) my guess is that many Asians have been sent mainly to study and assimilate on Western (political, economic, philosophical) ideology, culture and lifestyle.

And perhaps this could be one reason why there has been some interests on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in terms of growth in web searches and book sales in India.

According to Reason.com ``Apparently, Indians perform the second most Google searches for Dame Ayn after folks in the U.S., and Ayn Rand's book have sold 50,000 copies there since 2005, about the same sales are enjoyed by John Grisham." As you would observe, Indians have been the fastest growing Asian group during the last 10 years.

Although correlation may not be causation, and 50k copies of Atlas Shrugged is definitely infinitesimal compared to India's over 1 billion in population, our point is that Asians could gradually be adapting more of free trade ideals than their US peers.


According to dlc.org, global governments imposed 155 temporary tariffs at the pinnacle of the crisis in 2008. This is way below the annual average of 189 (from 2000-2008). Nevertheless most of the tariffs have been initiated by the US.

Hence global protectionists sentiment, in spite of the recent crisis and the proddings of Western progressives, appears contained.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

Could Asians be learning more of the Jeffersonian way?

Lessons From Atlas Shrugged: Senator Lacson Versus ex-President Estrada

This very interesting development from yesterday’s Philippine news headlines.

In a privileged speech, an incumbent Philippine senator, makes an exposition (accusation) against his old boss and erstwhile very close or dear friend, the former president, of some alleged malfeasances perpetrated when the latter had been in power.

We ARE NOT here to imply that such accusations are valid.

Instead, the point of our exercise is to demonstrate on how government interventionism begets crony capitalism or political entrepreneurship, which has been a common blight to the Philippine political economy, nevertheless applied to different levels of the state heavy economy.

And this could be an example of why the Philippines has fared badly in global competitiveness, thereby the lack of investments and the shortage of employment [see 2009 Global Competitiveness Report And The Philippines]

There have been two of three allegations raised in the expose that we'd like to deal with: Corporate arm twisting and dispensing of political favors by circumvention of the law.

All excerpts from the Philippine Daily Inquirer,

A. Corporate Arm Twisting (bold emphasis mine)

PDI: ``He [Senator Panfilo Lacson] said [President Joseph] Estrada had arm-twisted Yuchengco into selling his PLDT shares in August 1998 to Pangilinan’s group, the Hong Kong-based First Pacific Co., which eventually gained control of the telecommunications firm.

``The transaction showed Estrada’s “other sinister behavioral patterns” that Lacson said “must be told to the Filipino people.”

``“In August 2008, in the early part of Mr. Estrada’s abbreviated presidency, Mr. Alfonso Yuchengco was pressured to sign the conveyance of his 7.75 percent PTIC (Philippine Telecommunications Investment Corp.) holdings, equivalent to 18,720 shares to Metro Pacific, represented by Manuel Pangilinan,” Lacson said.

``He said these PTIC holdings corresponded to 2,017,650 PLDT common shares. PTIC at the time holds the biggest single block at 21 percent of the telephone giant. [Before the deal with Yuchengco, First Pacific had finalized the sales agreement on only 47 percent of PTIC—44 percent from the Cojuangco family and 3 percent from Antonio Meer. First Pacific could not touch the balance of 46 percent of PTIC shares because these were owned by the formerly sequestered Prime Holdings Inc., a shell company owned by the Marcoses, which was being recovered by the government.]

``Lacson said he learned later that Yuchengco was “pressed to sign a waiver of his right of first refusal over the PTIC shares of the Cojuangco-Meer group.”

``The senator said he learned years later that Estrada, then two months into his administration, had used the PNP to harass Yuchengco’s son Tito “with threat of arrest on some trumped-up drug charges to force his father, Mr. Yuchengco, to sell.”

``Lacson said he learned that the Yuchengcos were angry at him in the mistaken belief that Estrada had ordered him to harass them so that the patriarch would sell his shares.

``The senator said he was not aware of what had happened until later. “And if for example, Mr. Estrada would order me to do such thing, I am certain I will not follow him,” Lacson said.

``“The bigger and more important question remains—What was the deal in pesos and centavos between Mr. Estrada and Mr. Pangilinan, if any? Or should we rather ask, ‘How much was involved?”’ he said.

``Estrada’s friend Mark Jimenez reportedly brokered the $750-million PLDT takeover and got a $50-million commission for it. Jimenez denied getting such amount.

B. Political Favors (all bold emphasis mine)

``Lacson also claimed that Estrada had intervened in the release of smuggled shipments of dressed chicken parts from China and the United States as well as smuggled rice in Cebu.

``He said Estrada had told him to pull out his men, who were staking out a shipment of dressed chicken parts coming from near the Manila Hotel, after telling him his men were harassing people there.

``The shipment was eventually released. Lacson said he pointed this out to Estrada who in turn told him that he should have not pulled out his men.

``He said he got dismayed by this because he realized that Estrada’s order for him to fight crime and corruption was just a “moro-moro” (just for show).

The reply (rebuttal) of the former president here

All these indications are what Ayn Rand presciently warned in her monumental novel, the Atlas Shrugged...(bold highlights mine)

``When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.”

Again, the populist notion of "virtuous" big government isn't the answer (this is nothing but a big self-contradiction). Instead, a free market under a limited government is.

All the rest are mere delusions.