Ayn Rand is NOT Nostradamus

Several of the talk radio hosts were talking today about this op-ed piece from the Wall Street Journal: "'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years". I'm pleased that Atlas Shrugged is getting publicity still...but the non-educated are treating Ayn Rand as if she were some seer into the future, and they are making guesses as to how she could have possibly predicted what is happening right now.

There is no mysticism involved. Rather, Atlas Shrugged is not a novel about the government being evil or capitalism being the proper social system. It addresses those things, but there is much more to this novel than that. Ayn Rand was a genius, because she recognized how philosophy influences everything else in life. Her characters are expressions of philosophical ideas, from Lee Hunsacker's lament over his typewriter sabotaging his chances of writing his book (Marxism: the tools of production determine your thinking), to the party guest blandly saying "money is the root of all evil" (altruism/belief in self-sacrifice), to Cuffy Meigs carrying a gun and a rabbit's foot (faith and its corrollary, force).

If we had fought those bad ideas as we recognized them, we wouldn't be in the state we are today. The lesson from Atlas Shrugged should not be "Wow, she was right!", but "Wow, we need to defeat bad ideas or else things will get worse."