With increasing significance, the magnificent prophesy that is Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is being discovered and understood as never before. The book continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year, and has recently been rising in volume.

The genius that is Ayn Rand is usually discovered when a young person, perhaps by accident, picks up and undertakes the reading of this 1100 page monumental work. Depending on the readers presumptions, their reaction ranges from astonishment to disdain. In either case, such reactions are usually accompanied by an intensity that denotes the book’s power. In many instances, my own for example, the reader is never the same thereafter.

The publishing of Atlas Shrugged marked a significant transition in Ayn Rand’s love affair with writing. Those anointed as formal critics of such literary art, I refer to them as part of the blathering class, were universal in their denouncement; those on the left because of Rand’s unparalleled defense of individual freedom and its logical socio-economic expression, laissez-faire Capitalism; those on the right because of her critique of religion.

She never wrote another work of fiction.

Those of us who had discovered her however were to subsequently read a series of publications, initially tied to her association with NBI, but following its dissolution, featuring her again on her own, dealing with philosophical/political issues to which she continued to apply her powerful mind.

I was recently reminded of one such article. It was featured in SEPARATE a free on-line publication by Anders Ingemarson, concerning a significant current event along our highway of self-destruction. The declaring of bankruptcy by Detroit.

Said article was an analysis of the process of decay into which America has fallen. Specifically, the philosophical decay leading to political decay, wherein politicians identify, mold, fashion, and then cater to, groups to whom they then expect support in return.

The overall theme of the article was, as was always the case with Rand, philosophical.  If you are interested you can obtain the entire article and feel for yourself the power of her ideas.

Here is a particularly insightful paragraph. It is excerpted from; A Preview – The Ayn Rand Letter, 1972. It describes the interplay between groups seeking special favors and sanctions from the government, so as to avoid having to compete on the playing field that is freedom, and those from whom said legal “favors” are obtained.

There are two kinds of need involved in this process: the need of the group making demands, which is openly proclaimed and serves as cover for another need, which is never mentioned – the need of the power-seekers, who require a group of dependent favor-recipients in order to rise to power. Altruism feeds the first need, statism feeds the second, Pragmatism blinds everyone – including victims and profiteers – not merely to the deadly nature of the process, but even to the fact that a process is going on.

With recent events it has become apparent that America has entered the end game in its philosophical life/death conflict. Detroit is but a microcosm of the deadly nature of the process Rand cites above, and of those so blinded. America is the macrocosm.

The enormous philosophical treatise that is Atlas Shrugged, fictionally dramatizes the above process. It does so in a stunningly insightful manner, as it morally, politically, economically, socially, and psychologically, explains and then logically predicts where this evil folly must inevitably lead. It then does so by contrasting the values embodied by the proponents of freedom, and its currency of persuasion, to those engaged in the vulgar politics of tyranny, with its currency of compulsion. The former accruing to the benefit of all of us, the latter to the benefit of but some of us, while at the expense of the rest of us.

An expense the philosophy of freedom, with its currency of persuasion, can never be compelled to fund, as Detroit, and Rand, so clearly demonstrates.