Atlas Shrugged — VOICES for REASON

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there’s an unforgettable Thanksgiving scene at the mansion of Hank Rearden, a self-made millionaire industrialist whose achievements include the invention—after ten years of toil—of a revolutionary new metal, stronger, cheaper and more durable than steel. In addition to Rearden, seated at the table for Thanksgiving dinner are his mother, his wife Lillian, and his brother Philip, all of whom are wholly dependent on Rearden and his wealth.

Here’s is Rand’s description of the setting:

The roast turkey had cost $30. The champagne had cost $25. The lace tablecloth, a cobweb of grapes and vine leaves iridescent in the candlelight, had cost $2,000. The dinner service, with an artist’s design burned in blue and gold into a translucent white china, had cost $2,500. The silverware, which bore the initials LR in Empire wreaths of laurels, had cost $3,000. But it was held to be unspiritual to think of money and of what that money represented.

A peasant’s wooden shoe, gilded, stood in the center of the table, filled with marigolds, grapes and carrots. The candles were stuck into pumpkins that were cut as open-mouthed faces drooling raisins, nuts and candy upon the tablecloth.

In keeping with Thanksgiving tradition, Rearden’s family gives thanks for the bounty before them.

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Investor’s Business Daily recently released the disturbing results of a survey of doctors’ reaction to the government’s proposed “reform.” The most dramatic finding is that 45% of doctors would consider retirement if the plan were imposed. 45%. Can you imagine the devastation that would occur if anywhere near this percentage of doctors left the field?

Now, one survey doesn’t prove anything—but that raises the question: Why don’t we hear about surveys like this all the time, from anyone and everyone who conducts polls on health care? Why are there so few inquiries into what a given health care policy will do to doctors, the primary people producing the health care we are talking about every day?

Think about how many statistics, sob-stories, joy-stories, etc you have heard about patients under any number of systems — compared to the amount of concern you have heard about doctors; I’ve hardly heard any. Yet doctors are the people who provide the care that the patient consumes. Any discussion of health care that does not recognize the rights and achievements of doctors is morally and economically warped.

In a pair of recent posts on correcting health care injustices (here and here), Alex Epstein pointed out how treating health care as a collective good gives rise to the following kind of argument: “We as a society must make ‘tough choices’ about who gets health care and who doesn’t…. Since ‘we’ have finite medical resources, we inevitably have to sacrifice some people’s care to others, whether young to old or old to young.”

It is worth pausing to think about how that kind of policy plays out in practice. In recent weeks, we have heard strident rhetoric about the prospect of “death panels” voting to pull the plug on Aunt Minnie’s respirator—but no such dramatic scenes are likely, at least not anytime soon. What we are more likely to see, as health care rationing increases, are gradual changes in individuals’ attitudes toward their fellow citizens, as everyone competes in drawing resources from the same public health-care trough.

What kind of changes can we expect? In Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, one of the characters recalls what happened after his company medical plan started allocating medical care on the basis of collective need:

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CNBC just published a blog post by ARC’s Yaron Brook and me on Ayn Rand’s relevance to today. (Last I checked, it topped CNBC’s “most shared” story list.) The short answer:

Atlas Shrugged shows us an all-too-familiar pattern: Washington do-gooders blaming the problems they’ve created on the free market, and using them as a pretext for expanding their power. And more: it provides the fundamental explanation for why the government gets away with continually increasing its control over the economy and our lives.

I encourage anyone interested in learning more about the relevance of Atlas to today’s events to attend The Atlas Shrugged Revolution, coming up in September.

During a meeting today, my colleagues and I were discussing the frightening prospect that socialized medicine is right around the corner. Obama-care is not being opposed on any principled grounds – the only real dispute appears to be over the details, such as its projected cost. So if you are counting on somebody, like the Republicans, stepping in to rescue us from this impending disaster, think again.

I emigrated from Canada some time ago and at that point, one of the significant differences between the two countries was their respective approaches to health care. A relatively free market in health insurance and health care rather than a monolithic government-managed system? Terrific! You mean I’m not stuck on a long waiting list in order to see whichever doctors the government allows people in my geographic area to see?  Wonderful!

Should President Obama succeed in implementing “health care reforms,” those last remaining advantages of the American health care system will disappear. That would be disastrous for all of us, but it would be especially devastating for the medical profession.

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there’s a minor character, a brain surgeon named Dr. Hendricks, who refused to practice under a socialized medicine. This excerpt (reprinted in “For the New Intellectual”) explains why Dr. Hendricks decided to shrug: Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a flyer I wrote for the upcoming Independence Day Tea Parties. Many of those attending today’s Tea Parties are fed up with the assault on freedom they read about in each morning’s paper–but they have no positive alternative to offer. If the Tea Parties are to have a lasting impact it will be because they go from being a grassroots outpouring of frustration to a movement that stands for limited government, individualism, and individual rights. This, I argue, is the value of Atlas Shrugged to Tea Party attendees: it provides a powerful and revolutionary defense of those ideals.

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The publication of “Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,” edited by Dr. Robert Mayhew, couldn’t come at a better time. With all the attention the book and its author are getting in the media lately, those interested in learning more about the novel, its development and the revolutionary message it contains will find a wealth of information and analysis from experts in this new volume.

As a contributing author, I received my advance copy of the book today and am looking forward to reading it cover to cover. My own essay, titled “The Businessmen’s Crucial Role: Material Men of the Mind,” argues that Atlas Shrugged had to have businessmen such as Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart as its heroes by necessity because of Rand’s chosen plot-theme: “The men of the mind going on strike against an altruist-collectivist society.” Given that the leader of this strike says that the strikers will return to the world only when the lights of New York City are extinguished, what will it take to extinguish those lights? Who is it that keeps those lights on? My full answer is in Chapter 16.

As I look over the table of contents, I see titles of chapters such as “Who Was John Galt? The Creation of Ayn Rand’s Ultimate Ideal Man” by Shoshana Milgram, “No Tributes to Caesar: Good or Evil in Atlas Shrugged” by Tara Smith, and “Discovering Atlantis: Atlas Shrugged’s Demonstration of a New Moral Philosophy” by Greg Salmieri. Each of the twenty-two essays brings out the virtues of the novel and its underlying philosophy, Objectivism. Holding this volume in my hands, I am reminded once again of the sheer genius behind Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I’m honored to have had participated in this project.

The title of this article in The Week magazine was so perfect, I made it the title of this post. Ayn Rand was indeed a crusader for capitalism, one whose works have proven to be enduring. Just witness the surging sales of Atlas Shrugged and the burgeoning interest in her philosophy.

The article has some factual errors (such as describing Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve as the “apogee of Objectivism”) and misses some big points. However, I can’t resist quoting a few of the article’s better passages: Read the rest of this entry »

On its website Playboy has posted its dynamite 1964 interview with Ayn Rand. In the interview, Rand discusses her work and some of the practical implications of her ideas. The frank, wide-ranging conversation is particularly notable for its breadth.

Among the topics covered: guilt, original sin, emotions, motherhood, religion, morality, romantic love, sex, hedonism, promiscuity, charity, compassion, literature, government, free will, foreign policy, nuclear treaties, politicians and others.

Rand’s words, as they so often do, resonate as if they were spoken yesterday.

Read the whole thing here: http://www.playboy.com/articles/ayn-rand-playboy-interview/index.html.

April 28 is the official publication date for Essays on Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a welcome addition to the area of Rand scholarship.

Kudos to Dr. Robert Mayhew, the book’s editor, for his work spearheading this project. He’s also responsible for bringing to light three earlier collections of essays, on Rand’s We the Living, Anthem, and The Fountainhead. For readers already familiar with Rand’s fiction and her non-fiction writing, there’s much to be gained from the essays in these collections. I recall learning a great deal in the collection on The Fountainhead (I’d point, for example, to the superb chapter by my colleague Dr. Onkar Ghate).

The new book on Atlas Shrugged should now be available for pre-order at bookstores. You may also want to pick up the three earlier books of essays and complete the set.