Walking past Rockefeller Center this week reminded me of the 1957 dystopian nightmare novel by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
The book is one of the longest, most boring, and most poorly written tomes I’ve ever attempted to read.
Rand calls herself a philosopher. But it is easy to be a philosopher when all you do is set up straw-man arguments in a fictional world of your own creation.
Atlas Shrugged got terrible review when it first came out. But it has since evolved into a cult classic among free market capitalists for it’s exploration of “prime movers,” or leading innovators from industrialists to artists.
In Rand’s fictional story, society collapses as the government takes over free enterprise.
But why read the fictional horror in her book when you can read it for real almost every day in The Wall Street Journal.
October 28, 2010
Ah, reminds me when I was 18. I read Atlas Shrugged and suddenly I had the world figured out. Became a Libertarian for a couple if years. Then I grew up.