Are we living through a reverse Atlas Shrugged?
A revolutionary confluence
Ayn Rand was born in Czarist Russia in 1905. She lived through the Russian Revolution in 1917 and experienced the communist government that followed. She hated it.
What had been the fastest-growing economy in Europe became an impoverished wreck, and remained that way for the whole of the Soviet Union’s existence.
Rand fled to America in 1926. She spent the rest of her life writing novels and essays that promoted values opposite those espoused by communism and leftism.
The Leftist Worldview
Most leftists view profit with a skeptical eye. Communists go further and view labor as the only legitimate source of wealth.
To communists, saving money to create or buy a business robs workers of the fruits of their labor. Or, as Karl Marx put it, capitalism alienates workers from their own productivity.
Communists regard capitalist entrepreneurs as thieves, not producers. In the communist mind business people are villains.
More moderate leftists do not state things so strongly, but they share the same prejudices and intuitions. They see something vaguely wrong about earning your living from interest income or by hiring people to work for you. People who do that cannot be fully trusted. They must be controlled and forced to share. Wouldn’t co-ops be nicer?
Ayn Rand recoiled from these views. She had experienced their results and felt their bite. She went the other way.
Rand made entrepreneurs her heroes
This does not mean Rand viewed workers as the bad guys. Leftist intellectuals were her antagonists. These intellectuals corrupted the world, not the workers.
Throughout the 20th Century, leftist thinkers and activists advocated and organized worker strikes for higher wages.
Since the price for labor is constrained by natural realities — the demand for labor compared to the supply — it’s dubious whether these strikes helped workers.
The workers lost money while they were striking, and didn’t always earn it back from the pay raises they negotiated to end the strike.
Meanwhile, similar workers at non-unionized companies tended to do as well or better over time, just as the theory of supply and demand predicts.
Indeed, if the leftist intellectuals were right, wages would never rise without strikes. The owners would just pay what they preferred, unconstrained by supply and demand.
In practice, wages rise all the time, due to productivity gains, without the need for strikes.
This interesting phenomenon is examined in a fabulous little book called Why Wages Rise by F.A. Harper.
Rand looked at this situation and asked a powerful question…
What if the entrepreneurs went on strike instead?
The result is her epic novel, Atlas Shrugged.
The heroes in this story are entrepreneurs who get tired of being told they are parasites.
If entrepreneurs are parasites then workers should be able to create their own factories, without capital or visionary leaders. They would then own the companies and keep the profits. (Wouldn’t co-ops be nicer?)
But if the leftists were wrong then society should disintegrate.
Rand had seen this experiment run firsthand in Russia. She knew it led to economic disaster. She sought to dramatize three things in her novel…
- The slow build-up of a consensus among the entrepreneurial class to go on strike
- The retreat of that class to an enclave
- The disintegration of the leftist society they left behind
In her metaphor…
Atlas shrugged and the world fell off his shoulders
Rand’s fans have long fantasized about the possibility of an entrepreneurial strike in the real world. What they have seen instead are societies that either constrain or outlaw entrepreneurial activity,
The worst of these experiments, such as Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, have murdered or starved tens of millions of people while impoverishing the survivors.
The less severe experiments, such as Cuba and Venezuela, have taken once-prosperous societies and turned them into economic junkyards.
The most moderate examples, like Britain and the Scandinavian countries in the 50s through the 70s, became grey and stagnant before free-market reforms restored dynamism and prosperity.
But now we are seeing something completely unexpected.
Atlas Shrugged in reverse
Argentina was once among the wealthiest countries in the world. Then a bizarre leftist variant known as Peronism sucked the life out of it. But now…
The leftist intellectuals have lost their hold over the public’s mind.
The Argentines have elected a different kind of intellectual, the libertarian economist Javier Millei.
Under Millei inflation and housing costs are falling while economic activity soars.
Argentina is on its way to once again being one of Earth’s wealthiest countries.
In America the entrepreneurs haven’t gone on strike, they’ve taken over the government, in the form of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Their actions are not perfectly libertarian. Tariffs are a free market no-no. But they are moving things dramatically in the right direction, toward less bureaucratic control, less wasteful spending, and more economic dynamism.
Can anyone seriously argue that change wasn’t needed?
Interest on the soaring national debt threatens to consume the federal budget. But…
One good argument against Trump is that he won’t address the biggest problem — cancerous entitlement spending.
An even better argument would be that Trump’s unlibertarian anti-immigration policies worsen the demographic crisis underlying the entitlements problem.
Even so, positive change is better than a status quo aimed at disaster. And maybe more is possible, because the entrepreneurial revolution extends beyond government.
Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame, has just ordered a new libertarian editorial policy at the relentlessly left-statist Washington Post.
Entrepreneurial activity has also transformed the media landscape, driving leftist dinosaurs like CNN and MSNBC to the brink of extinction.
Such changes can change the culture and then culture can alter politics, moving it in an even more libertarian direction. Here’s the key point…
None of this is being done by politicians
With the exception of Millei, a libertarian intellectual, it is mostly being done by entrepreneurs who have decided to bring their skills to the world of government, politics, and media.
Instead of wrecking civilization, as the leftist intellectuals so often have, the entrepreneurs may be saving it.
Atlas has embraced his burden.
*****
If you like my work or want to keep an eye on me because you hate me, please follow me. That’s right, I’m inviting you to stalk me.
Copyright © Perry Willis 2025
Perry Willis is the co-founder of Downsize DC and the Zero Aggression Project. He co-created, with Jim Babka, the Read the Bills Act, the One Subject at a Time Act, and the Write the Laws Act, all of which have been introduced in Congress. He is a past Executive Director of the national Libertarian Party and was the campaign manager for Harry Browne for President in 2000.
