(1905-82) Controversial US author (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) born in Russia and an eyewitness to the horrors inflicted by the Bolshevik Revolution. By the time she emigrated to America in 1925, her core beliefs were established. In the foreword to her first novel, We the Living, Rand wrote: “When, at the age of twelve, at the time of the Russian Revolution, I first heard the Communist principle that Man must exist for the sake of the State, I perceived that this was the essential issue, that this principle was evil, and that it could lead to nothing but evil regardless of any methods, details, decrees, policies, promises and pious platitudes.” Free market capitalism, she believed, was the only system consonant with man’s rational nature. While a strong advocate of capitalism and individual rights (including property rights), Rand also advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected faith and religion; supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism.
Her breakthrough novel was The Fountainhead (1943), which tells the story of the idealistic young architect Howard Roark. The theme of The Fountainhead, as explained by Rand, was “individualism and collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul.” Initially rejected by several publishers, the novel went on to become an international bestseller and a film.
Her 1957 follow-up, Atlas Shrugged, portrayed a United States on the edge of collapse as a result of socialist and collectivist policies. The novel proved to be enormously influential and stunningly prescient. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the creeping socialist policies that followed caused the sales of Atlas Shrugged to spike. To anyone who had read the dystopian novel, it all seemed depressingly familiar. (American Thinker & Wikipedia)
Ayn Rand’s classic libertarian novel “Atlas Shrugged” describes a rebellion of the productive class against the encroaching socialist state. Her mythical hero, John Galt, encourages the most productive and essential corporate leaders in the nation to shrug the world of socialist burdens off of their shoulders and quit—knowing that without their skills and innovative leadership society under socialism will collapse. All these hard-working people retreat to Galt’s Gulch in the Rocky Mountains and prepare to rebuild later. There are similarities to this theme now as some of the best people are forced out of their jobs over these totalitarian Covid vaccine mandates. Sadly, the vaunted leadership class that Ayn envisioned leading the way has utterly failed to fight against the lies and deceptions of the false pandemic. They have either joined the conspiracy as knowing conspirators or become mindless yesmen and cheerleaders for these ruthless vaccines and freedom-wrecking Covid mandates. Instead there is a small but growing class of hard-working professionals who do the critical work of airlines, hospitals, railroads and ferries who are balking at the vaccine mandate, calling in sick, filing lawsuits and even quitting their jobs rather than submit to this tyranny. Just as in her fictional writing, as good people are forced out, it is creating havoc with the economy as shortages and delays get worse every day.1
