We are living "Atlas Shrugged"
BIG LIZARDS BLOG
Hatched by Dave Ross
Last October the 50th anniversary of the monumental novel by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, was celebrated by freedom-loving people all over the world.
This life-changing book, second only to the Bible in its influence on 20th Century Americans, was a quasi science fiction that predicted what would happen if the people who actually create things, the inventors, industrialists, the entrepreneurs, drop out of society and left the world to the people who think that the most noble job is to "serve mankind" rather than make money, be happy and live one's life to the fullest.
Predictably, the world grinds to a halt.
I have a friend, who is a specialist in the life of George Orwell and his equally-groundbreaking work, who has said for years that Orwell's predictions about Big Brother are all coming true.
I think it is just as demonstrable that Rand's dystopian vision of government bureaucrats running peoples' lives and ruining the economy is coming true—and the worst is yet to come.
Barack Obama, giving commencement speeches, sneers at graduates whose vision is to own their home or business. Instead he exhorts them to do something about global warming or other manufactured crises of the left.
"You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should by," he said about a week ago as if this is an ignoble pursuit.
He would prefer this: "But I hope you don't. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, though you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all those who helped you get here, though you do have that debt.
"It's because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential and discover the role you'll play in writing the next great chapter in America's story," he says.
That interpretation of the promise of America might be a surprise to the people who actually DID build the country. You know, those who hitched their wagons to oxen, not ideology. That's how this country was built. Obama might know that if he had every actually created a job, instead of attack those who do.
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