It’s perhaps more than 3-4 years since I have read Ayn Rand’s ‘Fountainhead‘ and ‘Atlas Shrugged‘ and while it takes me time to recollect even the subject names that I have studied during my MBA days, forget about the course books and content, I can very well recall many speeches, especially the huge one on Objectivism and plot-line of the books. But yeah, I am not special as ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has claimed the title of Second most influential book after Bible and has been moving People’s life since last many years.

However, the book’s popularity has surged last year with Ayn Rand as one of the most selling and popular author of 2008 and perhaps of 2009 too with bigger numbers. I have been huge Rand fan and blogged my state of mind in one of the old posts. If she is true, practical and can be followed or not, can be big discussion point, but everyone will agree that she is fascinating. And perhaps this fascination has caught the people’s attention in this turmoil times.

The Ayn Rand Institute attribute the growth in book sales with the astonishing similarity in the events that takes place in the book and in our real life, now-a-days. This is unprecedent Economic crises with many businesses already bankrupt while other on the brink of that. The government is coming with one after other economic reforms and policies like interest rate cuts, bailouts and Stimulus bill, Healthcare reforms, having TARP in place etc etc which is very similar to the whims and government intervention in the ‘Atlas Shrugged’.

If you have not read the book and wondering what all I am writing, then book’s plot is about the strike of the entrepreneurs who decided that it’s no more worth to produce goods and services in this government which would bizzarely tax and seize their wealth to distribute among the inept, greedy, failure business persons and politicians on the name of equality and fairness. They start disappearing one after another, with economy sinking each passing day and government coming up with one after another policies which all lead to vain. It’s a spiral downturn, the more government wish to regulate, the worse it gets.  Finally, it was all despair and gloom and the government pleads John Galt,  the movement leader to save them. There are many funny regualation imposed by the government in the book like ‘Anti-Greed’ Act, ‘Equalization of Opportunity’ Act and to quote my personal favorite ‘Anti-dog-eat-dog’:

The Rule provided that the members of the National Alliance of Railroads were forbidden to engage in practices defined as ‘destructive competition’; that in regions declared to be restricted, no more than one railroad would be permitted to operate . . . [and] that the Executive Board of the National Alliance of Railroads was empowered to decide, at its sole discretion, which regions were to be restricted.

The Us budget deficit has already crossed 1.5 trillion dollars which would  soon surpass 2.5 trillion under Obama’s regime. Obama might be a real life hero but in the sequence of events, he would be charming and intelligent villian, solely responsible for spoiling the economy. With immigration reforms, making things difficult for talented international pool to one after another bail-outs and government fundings to the incompetent and beleagured insurance companies, investment banks, automobile companies, Obama’s doing all the wrong things. With every wrong bail-out, the geniune hard worker tax payer’s money is lost, causing frustration. The stronger who have managed to sail through the tide are capped while incompetents are promoted. Atlas Shrugged talks on abolishing the income tax, zeroing the government intervention in economic affairs while US govt is busy doing the exact opposite.

I have read somewhere that when one of the Ayn Rand’s institute director has been told that a movie is being launched on the book, he or she chuckled that a movie is not needed, for we are having it live in our real lives. I am not sure but are the Manhattan skyscrapers lights going to switch off ?

Photo Credit: stuckincustoms