I just finished reading Atlas Shrugged for the third time in my life, each many years apart.
If you cut through the pedantic prose and the extended philosophizing it is amazing how prescient Rand was. It becomes easy to understand why liberals express such hatred for Ayn herself, and why they attack and ridicule Ayn's books.
Many of the events and actions she wrote about are now taking place right before our eyes and highlight what liberal government has done to the country.
Just a few:
- The looting and mooching by the masses, encouraged, aided and enforced by the government
- The open criticism of capitalism
- Attacks on the accumulation of wealth as unfair and greedy
- Attacks on the wealthy themselves
- Appeals of leftists to govern by feeling and "social fairness" over logic and reason
- The idea that the perceived needs of the lazy and slothful are justification for the forced redistribution of wealth from the productive and hard working
- The government's policy of rewarding failure, laziness and bad conduct
- The government's policy of punishing success, hard work and morality
- The government demonizing those who do not buy into their wealth redistributionist policies
- The government policy of building its own base of support by paying slackers and moochers off with wealth extorted from critics
- Cities and states going bankrupt through wealth redistributionist policies
- Labor unions driving industries into failure and bankruptcy
- Businesses staggering under ever-growing government rules and regulations that add cost, reduce productivity and create inefficiencies