Posted on 10/22/2008 8:01:44 AM PDT by BobbyT
So I see a lot of Atlas Shrugged references here, but not as many as I should given the current environment. It's a great novel, and John Galt's speech is fantastic, but not having read the novel in 6 or 8 years I realized I've been overlooking something even more relevant right now.
The story of the Twentieth Century Motor Company! The link just happened to be the first place I found it excerpted online, but the author has it dead on: it stands just fine on its own without the rest of the novel. It's the story of what happens when O'Teleprompter's philosophy is put into motion.
The results are predictable (for anyone with a shred of common sense), but the execution is brilliant (detail, etc). It even hits on Obama's view of children as a punishment...and bear in mind this was written over 50 years ago. Read it now!
Twentieth Century Motor Company
The part about the guy who likes to buy records makes me sad.
One paragraph
“God help us, ma’am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we’d been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it - for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man’s dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started. There weren’t many chiselers among us. We knew our jobs and we were proud of it and we worked for the best factory in the country, where old man Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country’s labor. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn’t an honest man left among us. That was the evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with, but you never thought to see alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few bastards, but that it turned decent people into bastards, and there was nothing else that it could do - and it was called a moral ideal!
Bump!
read rand’s 20th cent motor company
This story so impressed me that I typed it from the book many years ago and placed it in my book of favorites.
Ms. Rand was dead on with this analysis of human nature.
I have always thought that Hillary Clinton should play Ivy Starnes in the movie, should one ever be made. Hillary Clinton IS Ivy Starnes.
This is the great failure of our modern intellectuals AND our leaders. Conservatives no longer have the stones to call things by their proper names. They've ceded the high ground of language, facts, reason and logic to those who respect none of it. That was a deadly concession, for it reduces debate down to the barrel of a gun. It's coming, folks. War is coming.
And Bill could play Gerald.
Maybe Barney Franks for Eric?
"Who Is John Galt?"
I asked around and was told to go to the bookstore and read Atlas Shrugged.
Wowser!
Excellent post! It’s been almost ten years since I last read Atlas Shrugged — this was the best part of the entire book for me. Time for a re-read, I think.
Renewing rebump!
Ping
Bump!
Bump
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