I was searching for something to watch on a recent rainy weekend. I found the 2011 – 2014 film trilogy based on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on Amazon Prime. It has been at least 15 years since I read Atlas Shrugged and remember it being a brutal read. At over 1,000 pages filled mostly with monologues about the virtues of capitalism and the dangers of collectivism, it contained only a sprinkling of plot here and there. It was quite a commitment to get to the end. I wondered how the screenwriters, producers and directors would translate this tome into a movie, so I watched the entire set.
The films were largely panned by critics for two reasons. They weren’t really very entertaining and most film critics would likely consider themselves liberal or progressive. They wouldn’t like the depiction of the government and its supporters in these films, even if the films were good. I’m not a film critic, so I’m going to focus on the book and the films’ message and its relevance to today, not the quality of the acting or film-making.
Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957. Ayn Rand was born in Russia in 1905 and moved to the U.S. in 1926. She lived through the Bolshevik Revolution and the early years of communist rule. By the 1940s she had became staunchly anti-communist and developed a philosophy called Objectivism which espouses that individuals should pursue happiness as their moral purpose, productive achievement as their noblest activity, and reason as their only absolute. In her mind, Collectivism (“from each according to their ability and to each according to their need”) is a trap in which the productive in society ultimately are expected to continue to produce at a high level and then share equally with the unproductive.
[Spoiler Alert] The America of Atlas Shrugged has moved farther and farther left as politicians have convinced voters that the rich aren’t paying their fair share. The government solution to every problem is to implement additional stifling regulations, nationalize industries that won’t cooperate, and continue to raises taxes on the productive individuals and corporations. As the inevitable happens – weaker companies are forced to exit industries and shortages start to arise – the government continues to blame the greedy corporations and asks the public to be patient while they enact new reforms.
Rand calls people who produce more than they consume (entrepreneurs, business owners), “people with ability.” She also identifies “ordinary people” as those who do the best they can with limited ability, and “looters” as people who don’t produce anything but derive their worth by leeching off of “people with ability.” In the plot line notable “people with ability” begin to disappear. The leadership gap starts to impact society when the “ordinary people” and “looters” aren’t able to handle the organizational and supply chain problems plaguing society.
In Rand’s universe there are only a few industries and thus a few key leaders. These disappeared leaders end up in a secret valley in Colorado and begin building their own society based on Objectivist principles. John Galt turns out to be the leader of this movement. Could something like this happen today?
When Atlas Shrugged was published, there weren’t thousands of satellites circling the earth nor GPS technology. So we know a secret valley in Colorado isn’t possible. But what about “people with ability” leaving the country or dropping out?
We are seeing a bit of that already at the state level. According to a 2022 survey of 700 CEOs, the top states for business are Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, and North Carolina. The worst states for business were California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Washington. There has been a steady flow of people and businesses from these blue states to red states that accelerated during and shortly after COVID. Texas has attracted some 250 corporate headquarters since 2015 according to The Epoch Times. In one of the more publicized incidents, Rep Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) strongly protested Amazon’s plans to build a regional headquarters in New York. Amazon eventually abandoned those plans and moved to more business friendly Virginia.
At the national level, anti-business rhetoric coming from folks like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren certainly sounds a lot like speeches by Wesley Mouch, the head of the Economic Planning Bureau and one of the primary villains in Atlas Shrugged. During the Obama administration there was noticeable movement of US companies and investments to locations like Ireland that were considered more business friendly at the time. Two other developments are very reminiscent of the government’s role in Atlas Shrugged. First, the influence of leftist policies taking root in the financial services industry leading to more ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment policies are forcing organizations to either conform or risk being unable to access the capital markets. Second, the shift from focusing on equality to equity in the DEI space effectively links collectivist economics and civil rights. The push for equal outcomes is gaining steam with the push for reparations and more progressive tax policies continuing to be favored by the progressive left. “Pay your fair share..”
If these trends maintain their momentum through the 2024 elections, we will continue to see population and corporate movement from blue states to red states. And if red states begin turning purple as a result of the people migration, our “people with ability,” especially white people with ability, might begin looking internationally for locales they perceive to be less punitive toward their achievements or less bigoted toward people of European descent. It’s possible that we might see a white flight from America to Australia, New Zealand or back to Europe later in the century.
Is Objectivism the answer? I say only partly. Rand is right about the risks of government over-punishing the producers. But Rand was completely against any type of social welfare safety net including social security, medicaid, etc. She dehumanizes the “looters.” Every society is going to have a percentage of people at the bottom of the economic ladder who just aren’t really capable of adding value to an economic entity. When the elite disregard the needs of those at the bottom, those at the bottom may show up at their house with pitchforks. Rand should have known this as she lived in Russia when Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks at the end of World War I. Even More-Spock, a site committed to using more logic and less emotion when evaluating policy positions, would say that it is logical to suggest that a modest amount of redistribution is necessary to ensure those at the bottom are able to maintain a reasonable, if modest lifestyle.
The issue in the U.S. today is not so much that we don’t have a safety net for those at the very bottom, but that there are many people who could be “ordinary people” or even “people with ability” who either get stuck in the welfare system or choose not to pursue on-ramps to a more productive future. I thought Tim Scott did a marvelous job of pointing this out on a recent episode of The View.
Ultimately, it would be better for the future of America if people begin rejecting certain aspects of collectivism that are gaining momentum and embrace the American experiment as one that can benefit all, not just the Europeans who started it. But somewhat like Aesop’s countryman who had a goose that laid a golden egg each day, some Americans have decided that the goose is racist and we must kill it now so that we can distribute all the golden eggs to under-represented groups. We know how that ended for the countryman and his goose.