Ayn Rand and 'Atlas Shrugged' More Popular Than Ever

Sales of Classic Book Surge in Age of Obama

One of the most popular authors of 2009 is a woman, born in Russia, famous for her philosophical novels with just the hint of melodrama as well as her somewhat quirky personality. She has been dead nearly thirty years and her name is Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand's greatest work, Atlas Shrugged, sold two hundred thousand copies in 2008, when the current economic crisis began. Some have suggested that sales of Atlas Shrugged may triple in 2009. That is remarkable for a book first published in 1957. According to an essay by Stephen Moore, this surge in interest in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged can be attributed to the ominous parallels between the story of the novel and events happening in our own time.

Indeed Moore may have a point. Many of the initiatives being offered by the Obama administration, from the stimulus bill, to cap and trade, to health care "reform" could very well have been the sort of folly committed by the government bureaucrats depicted in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The government, in the novel, passes taxes and regulations, which causes economic malaise, to which the government reacts by passing more taxes and regulations. Eventually civilization itself collapses.

Part of the plot of Atlas Shrugged concerns a "strike" by entrepreneurs and others who are the producers of goods and services who, believing correctly that the government is making it impossible for them to do their work, quit in order to show people what life is like without them. They are the hated "rich" and "evil" big businessmen, damned by government propagandists, depicted as being only worthy of being fleeced and controlled. Dissent against the plans of the "benevolent" government bureaucrats is to be crushed. And it is all for the public good, of course.

It all sounds very familiar.