The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master," she wrote. Where there's service, there is someone being served. "It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Obama's frequently expressed view that the crisis demands that all Americans make sacrifices - and that those earning the most will need to "chip in a little more" - would have disgusted Rand, who believed that altruism was evil. "The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you."
"The current economic strategy is right out of Atlas Shrugged," the commentator Stephen Moore wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. The Obama administration's support for beleaguered homeowners and banks, they argue, smacks of tyrannical socialism, forcing the strong and successful to prop up the weak, feckless and incompetent. But Rand adherents see looming parallels in today's Washington. There is a reason, then, that Amazon categorises the book as fantasy. Starved of their genius, society collapses and wars break out until eventually bureaucrats are forced to beg the rebels' leader, John Galt, to take over the economy. Yesterday it was in 55th place, between The Reader and a book on cultivating very small gardens.Ītlas Shrugged tends to inspire either cult-like devotion or sarcastic mockery in readers, who are either thrilled or appalled by Rand's vision of a world in which the "men of the mind" - inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists - withdraw their labour from a society intent on bleeding them dry with taxes and regulations.įurious at being exploited by the government on behalf of the masses, who are described as "parasites" and "moochers", the striking capitalists retreat to a camp in the mountains of Colorado, protected by a special holographic shield. On 13 January it even briefly outperformed Barack Obama's wildly popular work The Audacity of Hope.
As of yesterday, the book's 30-day average rank on the website was 110, far above its average rank of 542 over the last two years.
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