60 Years of Atlas Shrugged: Celebrating Property Rights and the Spirit of the Individual - Freedom Forge Press - Val Muller:
October 10, 2017 - "Today, October 10, marks 60 years since Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was published. For those of you who haven’t read it – it is, after all, a lengthy tome – we wanted to highlight some of the freedom aspects we love about the novel....
"In the novel, the railroad industry crashes when a combination of over-regulation, cronyism, and other government meddling cause the entire system to malfunction. In her work, government regulation essentially means the loss of private property rights. With the collective ownership that follows, no one truly bears the consequence of a decision. Instead of going out of business or losing a job, politicians can always ask 'the rich' to pay a little more of 'their fair share' i.e., raise taxes to pay for incompetent decisions – until everyone suffers the consequence in a very literal way....
"In Atlas Shrugged, the 'good guys' are pushed to their limit in suffering abuse from the government. Changing regulations make it impossible for businesses to find a stable plan for producing goods and providing jobs. And ... government regulation removes economic consequences, leading the country to make decisions that business owners would never make if they had control of their own businesses. Crop failure and energy shortages occur, and in a country once as wealthy as America is now, people fear starving or freezing over the winter....
"In Rand’s work, government outreach for power is seen as theft. Those elected to power have not done anything to earn it other than engage in demagoguery and promises to redistribute other people’s tax money in a way advantageous to a particular voting group. Elected officials are not inventors. They are not engineers. They are not enlightened philosophers. The more their policies fail, the more their constituents rely on them to 'fix' what is broken, and the more likely they are to be reelected. Rand recognizes the ultimate paradox and hypocrisy of our system: that to improve one’s chances of being re-elected, one must be inefficient....
"Men are men when they can think for themselves and be allowed to know the truth and to use reason and facts to question those in power. When ignorance takes over and reason is replaced with what Rand calls mysticism, things fall apart. Mysticism, in a nutshell, is the belief that we must deny our own desires for the 'common good,' that we must make sacrifices for someone else, that no one can truly be happy indulging in their own lives, that we must deny the use of reason to defer power to others....
"In Atlas Shrugged, the 'good guys' are the producers ... the thinkers, the ones ready to work hard and make personal sacrifices for their own success and achievement. While their hard work does positively impact others, in the form of advanced medicine, amazing and economical metals, and the like, they did not set out to do things for others. They set out to fulfill their own dreams. And this is why those in power detest them....
"[A]t the end of the novel, Rand’s producers decide to boycott society in general. They remove themselves from society. They are the last talent left in the mindless world they inhabit, and without them the politicians have no power. Without their hard work, no one has anything extra to sacrifice for others. Without them, the 'mystic' beliefs of the politicians cannot stand.
"Like Thoreau and Gandhi, Rand pushes us toward a type of civil disobedience. Once they reach a certain point, laws seem to be merely a civilized way of stealing from some – or all. We like Rand’s work because it makes us question our role in society. We have been trained to be polite, as Rand points out, trained to believe that sacrifice and selflessness makes it okay for a government to steal much of our hard-earned money and create programs we have never heard of and never benefit from. Ayn Rand pushes us to think beyond our complacency, really to use reason to question our place in the world."
Read more: http://www.freedomforgepress.com/2017/10/10/60-years-atlas-shrugged-celebrating-property-rights-spirit-individual/
'via Blog this'
October 10, 2017 - "Today, October 10, marks 60 years since Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was published. For those of you who haven’t read it – it is, after all, a lengthy tome – we wanted to highlight some of the freedom aspects we love about the novel....
"In the novel, the railroad industry crashes when a combination of over-regulation, cronyism, and other government meddling cause the entire system to malfunction. In her work, government regulation essentially means the loss of private property rights. With the collective ownership that follows, no one truly bears the consequence of a decision. Instead of going out of business or losing a job, politicians can always ask 'the rich' to pay a little more of 'their fair share' i.e., raise taxes to pay for incompetent decisions – until everyone suffers the consequence in a very literal way....
"In Atlas Shrugged, the 'good guys' are pushed to their limit in suffering abuse from the government. Changing regulations make it impossible for businesses to find a stable plan for producing goods and providing jobs. And ... government regulation removes economic consequences, leading the country to make decisions that business owners would never make if they had control of their own businesses. Crop failure and energy shortages occur, and in a country once as wealthy as America is now, people fear starving or freezing over the winter....
"In Rand’s work, government outreach for power is seen as theft. Those elected to power have not done anything to earn it other than engage in demagoguery and promises to redistribute other people’s tax money in a way advantageous to a particular voting group. Elected officials are not inventors. They are not engineers. They are not enlightened philosophers. The more their policies fail, the more their constituents rely on them to 'fix' what is broken, and the more likely they are to be reelected. Rand recognizes the ultimate paradox and hypocrisy of our system: that to improve one’s chances of being re-elected, one must be inefficient....
"Men are men when they can think for themselves and be allowed to know the truth and to use reason and facts to question those in power. When ignorance takes over and reason is replaced with what Rand calls mysticism, things fall apart. Mysticism, in a nutshell, is the belief that we must deny our own desires for the 'common good,' that we must make sacrifices for someone else, that no one can truly be happy indulging in their own lives, that we must deny the use of reason to defer power to others....
"In Atlas Shrugged, the 'good guys' are the producers ... the thinkers, the ones ready to work hard and make personal sacrifices for their own success and achievement. While their hard work does positively impact others, in the form of advanced medicine, amazing and economical metals, and the like, they did not set out to do things for others. They set out to fulfill their own dreams. And this is why those in power detest them....
"[A]t the end of the novel, Rand’s producers decide to boycott society in general. They remove themselves from society. They are the last talent left in the mindless world they inhabit, and without them the politicians have no power. Without their hard work, no one has anything extra to sacrifice for others. Without them, the 'mystic' beliefs of the politicians cannot stand.
"Like Thoreau and Gandhi, Rand pushes us toward a type of civil disobedience. Once they reach a certain point, laws seem to be merely a civilized way of stealing from some – or all. We like Rand’s work because it makes us question our role in society. We have been trained to be polite, as Rand points out, trained to believe that sacrifice and selflessness makes it okay for a government to steal much of our hard-earned money and create programs we have never heard of and never benefit from. Ayn Rand pushes us to think beyond our complacency, really to use reason to question our place in the world."
Read more: http://www.freedomforgepress.com/2017/10/10/60-years-atlas-shrugged-celebrating-property-rights-spirit-individual/
'via Blog this'
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