The Lasso of Truth

Consider it a lead in to the world of Anthem

With all due respect to my intellectual betters, though I have no doubt there will be valid criticisms to be levied against the new Atlas Shrugged movie, this one seems to be so obtuse as to have come from someone who hadn’t even bothered to read the book…

O’Rourke goes on to make a point I’ve made here previously, which is that Shrugged’s producers really should’ve considered either: a) setting the film in some sort of ‘alternate’ future, in which trains were not considered the most vital means of transportation (requiring some alteration of Rand’s basic storyline), or; b) simply setting the film in an ‘alternate’ version of 1957, when the novel was actually published.

I suppose as a shallow observation this would ring true, but if the movie stayed true to the tenor of the novel, even the first time I read it the theme that stood out most prominently to me was that of a future America in social and industrial decline.  Starting from the first page, it is obvious that it’s humming industrial engine is slowly breaking down, losing all its vital parts.  The entire book is sprinkled with tiny vignettes that serve as marks of the decline – towns where roads have been neglected back to dirt and impoverished hovels reverting back to horse and cart for travel, due to a decline in manufacturing and rationing of fuel.

When Rand spends so much time painting the picture of an environment where technology, innovation and success have been stifled for decades, what could possibly lead the reader/watcher to expect a future where cross-continental travel is accomplished by any means that would require those vital incentives to exist?

At the dawn of the industrial revolution, a cross-continental railroad was a symbol of the height of man’s accomplishment.  We have progressed much further since then, but if you project forward into the beggar’s nightmare we seem to be descending into – one so prophetically detailed by Rand in the novel – it seems foolish to believe that the inevitable decline wouldn’t degrade things to the point where we too have to revert back to the railroad as the only reliable long distance transportation left.  Her story begins when other more advanced technologies have already been squandered or lost to incompetence.  But Rand was careful to warn that the decline wouldn’t stop there.  It would simply be the tipping point where the loss of the railroad, as the last vestige of a better world, would signal our full plummet into darkness – a darkness symbolized by the loss of all electrical power on the eastern seaboard, at the novel’s end.  If you honestly expected the future laid out by Rand to include anything more futuristic than a rusting railroad, then I respectfully think you’ve sorely missed the whole point.

So many of us have been conditioned to see the dystopian future as highly repressive yet technologically advanced beyond imagination.  It is to the credit of authors like Orwell and Zamyatin that they were able to leave that imprint as a general assumption of the totalitarian future.  But I once read a criticism of this template, from Rand, that technological advancement and innovation requires freedom for an individual to think and experiment, and in a totalitarian state where those are repressed or punished no such advancement is possible.  With this I completely agree and would even point out that this very concept is borne out in reality whenever one looks to the east of us, at the state of North Korea.

In this context, when you really do think about it, who are the silly ones here?  The ones who build a story in the future around a railroad, or the ones who expect a future as painted by Rand to have anything better?

***

And one last thing on P.J. O'Rourke's smarmy comment about John Galt presumably being played by a raincoat...In the book, a shadowy figure in a raincoat was all we saw of Galt until the second of the novel's three parts.  It's part of the suspense.  It's disappointing to see such a shallow toss off from someone who usually engages in more depth.

Sometimes it's about making the right enemies

Just a hint of the disconnect between establishment Conservatism, and the plebeians they purport to represent...

Why is Rand, dead since 1982, so hot again today? Ironically, big government, one of Rand's betes noires, is stimulating her sales. Her more than 1,000-page 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, sold 25 percent more copies in the first half of this year than it sold in all of last year, shipping a total of 300,000 copies so far this year—tremendous success for a 52-year-old novel.

Readers and pundits alike look at America and see a world scarily reminiscent of Rand's government-choked dystopia in Atlas. It's a world with a struggling economy where political pull matters more than success in the free market, where the government blithely takes over huge transportation industries.

[..]

The standard authorities of the American intellectual and political right have mistrusted, avoided or even hated Rand. One of the most ferocious attacks on Atlas Shrugged came from National Review and the pen of conservative hero Whittaker Chambers, a communist-turned-Christian (two things Rand couldn't abide).

Many of Ayn Rand's most vociferous critics are so-called conservatives who advocate less for a free market of ideas than they do for collectivism of a different stripe -- namely, selective social engineering based on religiously dominated group-think.

But love her or hate her, can anyone deny that the Obamanated America of today looks glaringly similar to the fictional world abandoned by John Galt?

But I still can't feed a family of eight there...

Further to my crow-eating here, Reason points me to more capitalistic crunchiness from John Mackey...

But we have not achieved our tremendous increase in shareholder value by making shareholder value the primary purpose of our business. In my marriage, my wife's happiness is an end in itself, not merely a means to my own happiness; love leads me to put my wife's happiness first, but in doing so I also make myself happier. Similarly, the most successful businesses put the customer first, ahead of the investors. In the profit-centered business, customer happiness is merely a means to an end: maximizing profits. In the customer-centered business, customer happiness is an end in itself, and will be pursued with greater interest, passion, and empathy than the profit-centered business is capable of.

Sounds like somebody's been reading Ayn Rand.

More at Reason, on the lettuce-eater's protests.

The flaw of a socialistic democracy

An interesting observation...

Across the developing world, from Russia to Venezuela to Mexico, as democracy faces new threats -- elected leaders who disdain its institutions, rising corruption, and nationalistic economic plans -- middle classes, once the vanguard of democracy, have increasingly turned against it. For the first time in decades, democracy activists are beginning to wonder whether building a strong middle class solidifies or threatens freedom's global spread. Yet because the middle-class-equals-democracy theory has become so entrenched, if it is proven wrong, activists, democracy-promotion groups, and world leaders will not know how to replace it. In other words, they won't have a clue about how to actually build democracy.

For years, political theorists have argued that developing a healthy middle class is the key to any country's democratization. To paraphrase the late political scientist Samuel Huntington: Economic growth and industrialization usually lead to the creation of a middle class. As its members become wealthier and more educated, the middle class turns increasingly vocal, demanding more rights to protect its economic gains.

But over the past decade, the antidemocratic behavior of the middle class in many countries has threatened to undermine this conventional wisdom. Although many developing countries have created trappings of democracy, such as regular elections, they often failed to build strong institutions, including independent courts, impartial election monitoring, and a truly free press and civil society.

The middle class's newfound disdain for democracy is counterintuitive. After all, as political and economic freedoms increase, its members often prosper because they are allowed more freedom to do business. But, paradoxically, as democracy gets stronger and the middle class grows richer, it can realize it has more to lose than gain from a real enfranchisement of society.

Is democracy under threat from those who benefit from it the most?  Maybe.  But the important question is not whether democracy really works, but rather whether we recognize that we are practicing the wrong kind of democracy.

The rift, as observed here, is one which widens as each successive generation of poor gets wealthier.  But the division between rich and poor is not the problem.  The manner by which you lessen the gap between is what creates an environment where the very democratic system which allowed for the enrichment of society's poor, becomes the threat to their newly acquired wealth.  This happens when a poor person makes the transition from tax-taker to tax-payer.

Poverty advocates are constantly agitating for more benefits to help raise society's poor from their hovels.  They tell those who suffer from poverty, that the fault of their circumstances lies at the feet of the rich who exploit them or the government who ignores them or select corporate interest groups who disenfranchise them in various ways.  They tell them that taking from the victimizers and redistributing among the afflicted is the only fair way to lift all boats on a rising tide.  Of course, people who envision themselves as victims will happily take back what they believe to have been stolen from them and will feel entitled to perpetuate the cycle of redistribution, for as long as the tax refund cheques keep coming in every year.

And then the unthinkable happens.

A small bout of hard work or good fortune lifts a family out of poverty and into the coveted middle class and suddenly a bill for income taxes comes in, on top of the hefty sum already pilfered from their paycheques throughout the year, and they realize that the so-called exploiters -- whose pockets they picked to get where they are --  were not exploiters at all.  They were average, hard working families, struggling to get by under the constantly growing burden of the social programs that -- contrary to their stated goal -- only serve to impoverish everybody while bloating the bureaucracy and breeding resentment among classes.

The democratic nature of our society -- the one that allows for freedom of movement, association and press; free and responsible elections; and an innovative and dynamic economy for the creation of wealth -- has no room to breed an environment where greed and resentment turns to disaffection with the democratic system.  It is only when we stray from the democratic formula, to impose an unfair burden on some while others undeservedly benefit from the hard work of their neighbours; when we stoke the resentment of the impoverished class by offering scapegoats and excuses to steal, instead of incentives to succeed; when we enlist the government to play Robin Hood with our fellow citizens; only then does the environment become one in which encroaching on freedom to preserve wealth and power is acceptable.  In fact, in such a system, curtailing the freedoms of societys wealthiest becomes the only way to preserve it.

It brings to mind the old cliche "be careful what you wish for, you just may get it".  A poor man becomes less poor and realizes that being mugged and villainized by his own government, for the sake of his clutching and grasping neighbours, is not such a fair system after all.

I've never been poor

...but I once made a movie about it!

From here...

To here...

To this...

It is often said that we live in the golden age of the documentary film. To the extent that this is true, the gold gleams brightest for the drama quotient of recent documentaries. The quality of their social analysis, for those that claim this to be their purpose, has generally been much dimmer. The latest contribution to the genre, The End of Poverty, from filmmaker and scriptwriter Philippe Diaz, is even dimmer than the norm. It devotes 106 minutes to the causes of poverty, but delivers neither drama nor good analysis. The core message is plain: The global South is poor because the developed countries made it that way and wish to keep it that way; free trade is bad and Western corporations are bad; the West is rich because the South is poor.

If I were to judge The End of Poverty as an Entertainment Weekly reviewer I could give it no more than a C-plus. The cinematography and production values are good: The costumes from Bolivia are colorful, the Brazilian accents are romantic and the media-trained talking heads have lovely artworks behind them. It all feels appropriately serious, if somewhat soporific. As a movie, however, it offers no suspense, plot twist or character development. It is didactic in a respectable, old-fashioned way, and that means the movie cannot justify itself as entertainment. It has none of the interesting self-subverting features of a movie like Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 I Am Cuba, an ostensible critique of capitalist exploitation that was banned from Cuba and the Soviet Union in part for making capitalism look too glamorous.

And so, in assessing The End of Poverty we must treat it as a true documentary, as an unfortunate captive audience might watch it in a high school class. That means we have to turn to the facts, and that is where the film gets not just dim, but downright ugly.

[..]

I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not.

RTWT

Galt's Gulch is all in your mind

The Chomskys of the world are just pissed off that where they were so egregiously wrong, she was right all along...

Ms. Rand, a Russian émigré who escaped the Communist revolution to work in Hollywood, has always been a lightning rod for the left, who seem as incapable of understanding her as they are reluctant to read her. But who wouldn’t love a figure dubbed by paranoid socialist Noam Chomsky (Hugo Chavez’s favourite author), “one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history.”

Ms. Rand’s message is continuously misinterpreted. For example, a columnist in the British Daily Mail suggested this week that Atlas Shrugged was a novel “on the animal forces of capitalism,” using John Maynard Keynes’ dismissive phrase. In fact, the novel is about the supreme rationality of capitalism. All the “animals” work for government.

The intellectually superior do-gooders have run out of steam in their pretense to relevance and usefulness.  The time has come to cull the herd.

Cashing in on a crisis

When things go wrong, they always say "follow the money".  Although when you do, you may be surprised where you end up...

Warren Buffett promoted the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), and lambasted the greed on Wall Street, yet he is one of the main benefactors of the TARP largesse according to a Sacramento Bee story.

Buffett endorsed Barack Obama for President last year, and Obama tapped Buffett to be a member of the candidate’s economic team. Obama requently referred to Buffett’s endorsement during the campaign as proof that he had the capability to deal with the troubled US economy.

But I am not surprised.

For a so-called "capitalist", every public statement he's ever made and all of his philanthropic endeavors, have always been in support of some socialist cause or other.  You can’t make as much money as he has, squeaky clean, while simultaneously promoting the things he does.

Contrary to the assumptions of the leftist retards who think anyone with a seven-figure bank account is a capitalist -- Warren Buffet is not a capitalist with a conscience, but rather a socialist with the right friends.

Or an OPPORTUNIST.  Which is essentially the same thing.

Fresh from the Politiburo

The latest Drudge headline inspired me to offer a little advice to the Canadian Government who is currently trying to "stimulate" our own economy in these hard times:

- Cut corporate tax rates

- Offer investment incentives

- Keep your regulatory fingers out of it and pitch Canada as a refuge for business owners and investors who don't want to fall victim to the world's largest socialist Utopia!

It's not that far a hike across our friendly little border.  Nothing would stimulate the economy more than having every major viable business migrate north for safe haven.

Now that's change you can really believe in.

To my American friends who may feel a little thrown under the bus by this sentiment, all I can say is that if a phoenix is destined to rise from the ashes of this madness, better your mushy neighbours to the north than say, Russia, China or the United Muslim States of Europia.

Atlas is Shrugging

My dearest Ragnar...

could that be you?

Why "Atlas Shrugged" Matters

Mike Baron lays it out...

The reason becomes immediately apparent upon reading.  It might have been written yesterday.  Rand’s description of a socialist state taken over by “looters,” people who cannot create or produce but who seize power under the rubric of “fairness” is so spot-on accurate of today’s administration it’s scary. 

[..]

The delightfully named Stanley Mouch (”Mooch”) serves as First Secretary to the mysterious Mr. Thompson, the head of state. 

Mouch had summoned them all to Washington, as his friends and personal advisers, for a private, unofficial conference on the national crisis.  But watching him, they were unable to decide whether his manner was overbearing or whining, whether he was threatening them or pleading for their help.

“Fact is,” said Mr. Weatherby primly, in a statistical tone of voice, “that in the twelve month period ending on the first of this year, the rate of business failures has doubled as compared with the preceding twelve month period.  Since the first of this year, it has trebled.”

            “Be sure they think it’s their own fault,” said Dr. Ferris casually.

            “Huh?” said Wesley Mouch, his eyes darting to Ferris.

            “Whatever you do, don’t apologize,” said Dr. Ferris.  “Make them feel guilty.” 

“But it is their own fault,” said Eugene Lawson, turning aggressively to Dr. Ferris. “It’s their lack of social spirit.  They refuse to recognize that production is not a private choice, but a public duty.  They have no right to fail, no matter what conditions happen to come up.  They’ve got to go on producing.  It’s a social imperative…  There’s no such thing as a persona matter-or a personal life.  That’s what we’ve got to force them to learn.”

“Well, if you want to talk practice,” said Fred Kinnan, “then let me tell you that we can’t worry about businessmen at a time like this.  What we’ve got to think about is jobs…  If you want my advice-ohm, I know you won’t go for it, but it’s just a thought-issue a directive making it compulsory to add, say, one-third more men to every payroll in the country.” 

Can’t you just see Rahm Emanuel, Paul Begala, Obama, Pelosi and Axelrod saying these things?  Speaking of Pelosi:

Last week I almost quit.  It was over Chick’s Special.  Mr. Chick Morrison of Washington, whoever the hell he is, has gone on a speaking tour of the whole country-to speak about the directive to build up peoples’ morale…  He demanded a special train for himself and party-a sleeper, a parlor car and a diner with barroom and lounge.  The Unification Board gave him permission to travel at a hundred miles an hour-by reason, the ruling said, of this being a non-profit journey.  Well so it is.  It’s just a journey to talk people into continuing to break their backs at making profits in order to support men who are superior by reason of not making any. 

The solution Rand offers is for the men and women of industry and business to simply withdraw their skills and energies from the market rather than place them in the service of an evil socialist state.  In “Atlas Shrugged” they go to a secret valley in the mountains.  In real life, millions of Americans are reevaluating their efforts in light of the Obama administration’s punitive and senseless tax and spend policy.  It is a viable option and one which every right-minded American must consider.  And by right-minded, I mean Americans who understand the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to whom the pursuit of happiness is holy but the guarantee of happiness is a cruel joke perpetrated by the present gang of looters in the White House and Congress who couldn’t make a buck if their lives depended on it.

"Barney Frank is a petty bureaucrat-cum-dictator"

For that line alone, Rossputin makes the Justice League.

My new hobby horse: Rand was right

How many of those intellectualist dweebs, who spent years poo-pooing Ayn Rand's "radical" ideas and "implausible" social scenarios, are shaking their heads and blinking in wonder that the world she wrote about is now spontaneously materializing before their very eyes --exactly as she'd envisioned it..?

In human behavior, incentives matter. People are choosers, not automatons. Mess them over enough and they're out of here. All history proves it. "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." That bitter joke among Soviet factory drones sums up collectivism's ultimate failure wherever tried.

Of course, in the 1950s, when Rand was writing her epic about a slow-spreading spontaneous strike among Americans fed up with big government, tomorrow supposedly belonged to New Soviet Man. Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II, the three champions of freedom who would prove otherwise, weren't yet heard of.

[..]

The novel may not be great literature. But its message of radical self-reliance has inspired millions across the decades. And the story is set right here. "We can't lose Colorado. It's our last hope," says a railroad employee at the start. A Rocky Mountain valley is the retreat from Galt that triumphs at the end.

Conference attendees at The Broadmoor, where Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute spoke after Malkin and "Atlas Shrugged" was assigned reading, weren't about to unplug Galt-style from daily life in protest against wind power, national health care, and charity-choking taxes. But they took seriously the disincentive effects against wealth creation and social comity in these and other collectivist proposals. We should, too.

As ever more people ride in the wagon and fewer are left to pull it, there will come a breaking point. Crowding taxation onto the highest earners and debt onto our kids, as President Obama proposes, invites collapse. Ignoring the constitution at will, as Gov. Bill Ritter and the spending lobby do, breeds contempt. Ruin must result.