Atlas Shrugged Updated for the Current Financial Crisis

Ayn Rand’s clas­sic gets dust­ed off and humor­ous­ly brought into 2008 over at McSweeney’s. Worth a read. 

As a side note, you may want to revis­it the New York Times 2007 piece, Ayn Rand’s Lit­er­a­ture of Cap­i­tal­ism, which talks about the influ­ence that Atlas Shrugged (and its free mar­ket phi­los­o­phy) has had on For­tune 500 CEOs and par­tic­u­lar­ly Alan Greenspan, the for­mer head of the Fed­er­al Reserve, who helped archi­tect the dereg­u­lat­ed bank­ing sys­tem that’s now unwind­ing around us. Belat­ed­ly, Greenspan would acknowl­edge a “flaw in the mod­el” that he “per­ceived is the crit­i­cal func­tion­ing struc­ture that defines how the world works” — which is a fan­cy way of say­ing “on sec­ond thought, maybe the free mar­kets don’t always reg­u­late them­selves.” And there we have it, anoth­er utopi­an ide­ol­o­gy col­lides with real­i­ty. Not the first, and it won’t be the last.

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