If you never have, and you’re feeling confused about what’s going on in America today, it’s time for you to read Ayn Rand’s, Atlas Shrugged. This prescient novel, which lauds reason and objectivist and libertarian philosophy written over fifty years ago, was never more relevant than it is today.
This is important because although we’ve been headed down the collectivist path Rand so brilliantly warned us about, we are now at a specific and critical juncture. What tells me this? People used to become upset with me, some even on the right, when I’d use the “S” word (socialism) when describing the political left in our nation. They described the term as mean-spirited and said it, “went too far.” Now Newsweek declares, “We are all Socialists now,” right smack on its magazine cover.
We’ve recently elected an American president, the heir to the legacies of the likes of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, who together with his political party in the majority, appears to have no qualms about pressing forward with—not a subtle socialist-like agenda, but a blatantly socialist one.
In Atlas Shrugged, among many other lessons, Rand teaches us the socialist immorality of rewarding failure and punishing success, thus resulting in an ever-growing entitlement class and an ever-shrinking productive class, which can only lead to a greater loss of liberty, political and economic collapse, and eventual governmental totalitarianism.
The current “soft” tyranny of seemingly beneficial social programs that primarily benefit the unproductive to the financial harm of the productive, can only lead to a “hard” tyranny, once the productive begin to disengage and a forced working class becomes necessary.
Do I truly believe that a socialist society will emerge in the United States? No I don’t; I hold out hope that this nation, conceived in liberty, still has enough liberty-loving patriots so that Washington’s, Jefferson’s, and Adam’s America will not parish from the Earth. However, I do fear the damage that will be done while those currently in power spend their political capital like a scorned woman armed with her soon to be ex-husband’s no-limit credit card, paying back the constituents responsible for putting them in power with a massive political payback disguised as an economic stimulus package, at a mind-numbing, head-spinning, vision-blurring velocity.
Come on America; pay attention and get involved.
0 Comments