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.
She was an atheist, and creator of a new philosophy which her detractors invariably fail to properly describe. Even many enthusiasts, don’t do her justice. I recommend reading her 1957 book “Atlas Shrugged” which sold over 500,000 copies last year to see what all the fuss is about.
Thank you for clearly stating the subject and bringing in Greece and France. So few of us understand this concept and are tortured by the train wreck we are forced to watch as our country gets killed in a small four years under our President. There will be no Galt to rescue us. No valley to escape to. Too many producers will side with the Moocher Class because they were brainwashed to do so. We are so doomed.