Thanks for posting this. It's been a while since I read this passage.

I wish it wasn't so DEPRESSING, but there it is, that's reality for you.

While this seething contempt for electoral democracy is certainly vintage Rand, I have never detected such sentiments on your blog, so I am a little surprised to see this invoked here as support for your political position. You may find it reassuring that I moved from the US to Canada about fifteen years ago, and I can report that doctors here feel quite free to be just as pompous, arrogant and generally insufferable as Hendricks, and just like most (not all, but most) of the doctors that I encountered in the real-life US as well.

Deb -- I agree!

Jerry -- I'd say the real issues right now with contempt for electoral democracy are emanating from Washington, not Rand. Have you looked at the polls lately? The people do not want this bill. And perhaps it's because I come from a family heavily populated by doctors and research scientists--but I find your attitude toward physicians to be extraordinarily sad, and symptomatic of the problem.

As for Rand, her paragraph on socialized medicine--published half a century ago--anticipates with chilling accuracy what has happened to the practice of medicine in places like Britain and Ireland, where the profession is so devalued and unrewarding that their best and brightest are not training in medicine, that they are having to import sub-par doctors from other nations, and that incompetence, rationing, and substandard care have become the norm.

".....having to import sub-par doctors from other nations, and that incompetence, rationing, and substandard care have become the norm."
I too think that will happen here, but I think it will go further. Once the imported, sub-par doctors are a majority, or at least a significant percentage, of all doctors, the government will finally "give" conservatives what they have been demanding for many years: severe curbs on medical malpractice suits. I don't think there's any way the government can run the health care system with the doctors who will be practicing under socialized medicine, and still allow medical malpractice suits. You may be able to sue for a truly botched procedure, but you won't get much; and, likely, you won't be able to sue at all for any procedure done in good faith, or for procedures that weren't done, due to cost-effective guidelines. This is my fear regarding the government taking over the medical establishment: Bad care and no legal recourse. That's the way it is in European countries with government run health care, especially the no legal recourse part.
Some will argue that will never happen here because the Democrats would never do that to Trial Lawyers who are a large percentage of their donor base. If the Left gets its way, there will be plenty of opportunities---increased opportunities, btw---for Trial Lawyers to sue businesses large and small for various infractions of various complex regulations that will control our finances, our health and our social relations.

The comment about "seething contempt for electoral democracy" seems strange to me, Jerry. Do you think that electoral democracy gives the electoral moral right to do anything it wants to to any minority? Do you think it is somehow showing contempt for democracy for that minority (and those who are concerned about fairness to the minority even if they are not part of it) to use public discourse in order to modify the opinion of the majority before it is set in concrete?

Erin,

To be clear, I'm not necessarily on board with what is going on re: The American Government. However, I'd like to see you parse out why you think Rand--and _Atlas_ in particular--serves as an appropriate authority on all of this. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Hendricks makes this speech out in that secret society under the invisible force field in the mountains. If not, the fact remains that the novel, which so many think is philosophically informed, still contains a utopian society in the mountains hidden by a force field. I really don't know if such a thing offers any real insight into the lives of "real Americans" living outside of utopian societies not hidden by force fields. (Also, I think this book's real failure is that its main characters are already rich and powerful; _The Fountainhead_ provides a much better perspective on ideology, tastemaking, and political power, IMO.)

I think many of Rand's acolytes grant her far too much credit, sort of like Stewart's acolytes believing that he brings everyone real news. In a way, he does. But he also doesn't.

(And for the record, I'm not suggesting that abstraction--or creative liberties--cannot result in pragmatic philosophy. I just don't think _Atlas_ succeeds in doing that.)

J -- It's really very simple. I am reading Atlas Shrugged right now, and am continually struck by how prescient--if heavy-handed--Rand is about the kinds of mentalities and unintended consequences that arise when central planning goes into overdrive. I don't position her as "an appropriate authority on all of this," but merely as someone with remarkable foresight whose thoughts on causes and consequences (if not on solutions) offer us additional perspectives for thinking about our present moment. You are right that Rand is awfully utopian in her thinking--but I also think the observation is a tautological one. She knew that, and was deliberate in her decision-making on that front; she was also acutely aware of the tradition of utopian (and dystopian) fiction, and had already published one explicitly dystopian novel by the time she wrote Atlas Shrugged. Your critique seems to be to be, in that sense, less a critique of AR than a critique of the genre she's participating in (would you criticize Orwell, Huxley, or Wells for the same reasons you criticize her?).

To me, then, it's more interesting to think about why Rand abandons realism in her fiction (which she does, too, in The Fountainhead, and most obviously in Anthem) than it is to criticize her for failing to articulate a realistic solution to the problems she poses. She was pretty clear about her choices on that level, as well--so much so that I probably err there when I say "failing."

Much more basically: sales of Atlas Shrugged have been through the roof ever since the economy collapsed. The phrase "going Galt" has become part of our popular culture. Rand is proving to be a philosophical touchstone for a grassroots movement that is growing by the day in this country. For that reason alone, I would think, it's worth reading her work. And for what it's worth, that's why I decided to read Atlas Shrugged.

Okay, end of the day, need to get away from the computer. I'll work mostly backward through your comments. I don't really place much stock in Rand's sales going through the roof lately since that trend has been driven, I think, by a variety of forces--not the least of which is the Borders over on L St NW putting enormous copies of the book front and center in the store--making it difficult to isolate the collapse of the economy as *the* driving force behind her newfound popularity (though I would not write that off altogether).

I also think that Rand should be given more serious consideration all around. Though, again, even though I quite like _The Fountainhead_ (for pretty apolitical reasons), it's hard to fit such a big novel in any kind of survey course that I might design.

Rand might have been prescient; John Dos Passos was as well. My problem with _Atlas_ is that unlike, say, _The U.S.A. Trilogy_, I can't sympathize with the plight of rich and powerful geniuses. And that's really a literary critique, I think--that her characters are not sympathetic. It might be a matter of taste, though. I'd be willing to admit that.

Along those lines--and related to my opening point--we might ask why people are gravitating toward Rand instead of Orwell or Huxley. That, to me, seems the more pressing question, because, again, I think at this point, there is an urge at some level to reclaim her work as an antidote to our very specific social context, whatever that might be, which strikes me as different than the colloquial use of the term "Big Brother" as a means to reference nonspecific governmental oversight. Sure, we can use the term "Big Brother" in a very specific way to talk about airport security and the like, but it seems to me that the allusion is often made more abstractly (though often appropriately). This Rand business, at least in the way the media have framed it, reads more like: "Don't like Obama, read Rand. She'll straighten you/him out." And that's the part that I don't really get--if, in fact, she's calling attention to the problems of control.

J -- Interesting questions and thoughts.

I agree with you that Rand is not a great fiction writer -- but I cut her some slack because I see she's trying to put her ideas in motion by way of storytelling. She's not the first philosopher to do that and won't be the last. On the subject of why Rand right now, rather than Orwell or Huxley ... I think people are returning to 1984 (I know I've reread it in the past year), though can't speak for Huxley. My hunch is that Rand gives us a romantic bildungrsoman framework that beats the stifling, hopeless quality of something like 1984 to smithereens--whether it's Roark or Hank Reardon or Dagny Taggart, she shows us strong superhero characters whose strength lies in qualities like hard work, relentless effort, honesty, creative vision, and the will to triumph over setbacks and challenges that include being profoundly misunderstood by "society." She's also exceptionally focussed on work as a moral value and a source of personal strength and creative contribution. That's extremely American, very Horatio Alger in its way, if you think about it.

Also, she shows us the process by which the state swallows the individual and gets the majority to consent to it--and even if it's fabulistic on some level, it's more gripping than a story about a world where that has always already been achieved.

Finally, she really believes in the self-correcting power of the free market as the engine of wealth and happiness for all. Sure, she's a fundamentalist about it--but it's refreshing right now to see someone take that idea seriously in a fictional context. I think that's got a lot to do with her mass appeal right now--we are living in a moment when the media and most of our entertainment, not to mention the government, sends the message that markets are dangerous, that capitalism is immoral (or, to quote Michael Moore, "evil"), and that we need an elite class of (corrupt) planners to protect us from them. People are sick to the teeth of the hypocrisy of that gesture, and Rand becomes refreshing by contrast.

In January, John Stossel devoted an episode of his new show on the Fox Business channel to the rising popularity of Atlas Shrugged. Part one is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmAzEsrtyo. The rest is on YouTube, too.

Huxley/Orwell...Huxley's Brave New World is pretty anachronistic..."Ford's in his flivver, all's right with the world" I think most everyone reads 1984 and/or Animal Farm in school...I wish more people would read Orwell's essays, but most of them are so tightly tied to the world of 1930s Britain that they'd be hard to appreciate for someone not fairly knowledgeable about that time & place.

Regarding Rand..it's interesting that she once had the ability to create pretty realistic characters (I'm thinking of We the Living) but lost or deliberately gave up much of this ability. This is recapitulated by the Dagny's love life in Atlas Shrugged, in which she progresses (regresses?) from Francisco, who is a pretty vivid character, to Hank Reardon, who is less vivid, to John Galt, who seems to have very little actual personality but is more a pure abstract idea.

I thought that most people outgrew Ayn Rand at about age 18, when they realized that resentment and avarice ought not to rule the day. No doctors' lives will be "throttled" by this bill, and the millions that it helps are not "smug," but thankful. I am among them.

Adam -- Where do you get the idea that Rand advocates resentment? I think her novels are actually quite idealistic about human nature -- and that to the extent she talks about resentment, she treats it as a moral failing that diminishes the humanity of anyone who harbors it. As for avarice--she definitely advocates for selfishness, but she has a very specific definition of what that is and of how it should work to produce win-win encounters for people, rather than the win-lose paradigm presupposed by the concept of avarice as I expect you use it here.

Recently there have been several discussions of Rand and the general consensus was she was passe. Not that I'm an expert.

The point is now whether her eye for a quote proved accurate. The statistics on countries with socialized medicine are pretty good. Meh.