The Historic Significance of Atlas Shrugged By Robert Tracinski
Atlas Shrugged was written in an age of creeping global socialism. Extrapolating from the trends of the day, Ayn Rand projected a future in which most of the world’s nations are collapsing into the poverty and oppression of socialist “people’s states,” while America itself is collapsing under the weight of an increasing government takeover of the economy.
She saw the dramatic potential in asking a single question: what would happen if the innovative entrepreneurs and businessmen—after decades of being vilified and regulated—started to disappear? The disappearance of the world’s productive geniuses provides the novel’s central mystery, both factually and intellectually....
Ayn Rand’s detractors sometimes dismiss her novels as “unrealistic,” but it is today’s mainstream intellectuals who frequently seem as if they are wandering around in a fog of unreality, missing the monumental lessons of two centuries of history. The era of encroaching global socialism has since given way to an era of global capitalism, which is beginning to transform the lives of billions of people across the globe, from Eastern Europe to India to China. But there is no one to help them understand what capitalism is, its deepest personal meaning for their lives and values, and why it is good.
No one, that is, except Ayn Rand. And that is why Atlas Shrugged is even more relevant and necessary today than it was when it was first published five decades ago. Cont......
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/10/the_historic_significance_of_a.html