The Moocher Class, the Producer Class, and Ayn Rand’s Predictions

Ayn Rand was born in Russia and came to the United States in 1925. Impressed with America, she found a way to stay. In the 1940s, seeing in New Deal liberalism the same philosophy of state control of everything that she despised in her homeland, she began writing about free-market capitalism. Her landmark novel, Atlas Shrugged, predicted the eventual outcome of the creeping socialism that we see today in many countries. It wrote about a United States where the government gradually took over more and more influence and money, until it came to a time where the producer class decided they wouldn’t support the moochers any more.

Once you accept FDR’s premises on which the New Deal was built – his new bill of rights that including the right to be free from want, the right to health care and the other affirmative rights he believed in, then you abandon free market capitalism. In order to give people these things, the government has to take them from others. This creates the producer class and the moocher class.

In the beginning, the system may be workable. But as people begin to realize that they can just drift through life and others will take care of them, you get a growing number of people who want to be taken care of. And as the producer class gets smaller and smaller, at some point the producers will lose their incentive to produce and the system will break down. This is the theme of Ayn Rand’s novel. The producer class, “Atlas” in her book, got tired of having the government take their property for the benefit of those who didn’t want to work as hard or at all, and they rebelled.

What is happening now in Greece and in France is exactly that. And in the United States we have the seeds of the same thing.

Read my posting about Atlas Shrugged, the Movie.


About mesasmiles

By Dr. David Hall. Dr. Hall runs Infinity Dental Web, a small company that does Internet marketing for dentists. He has had a long-standing interest in politics and as a college student toyed with the idea of a political career.
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