Who is John Galt ? | Opinion | murrayledger.com – Murray Ledger and Times

Being without cable and internet for several days gave me the opportunity to dust off some of my old DVDs and watch them. Three were parts I, II and III of Atlas Shrugged, based on Ayn Rands seminal 1957 novel. Rand was born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia on Feb. 2, 1905, a mere 11 days after the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre of Jan. 22, 1905. Her father was a pharmacist and she grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. After the Communists came to power in November 1917, they confiscated her fathers business and the family fled to the Crimea, many miles to the south.

She emigrated to the United States in 1926 when she was 21 years old, changed her name to Ayn Rand and set out for Hollywood. Her most well-known works are We the Living (1936), The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). So-called professional literary critics did not like her books, but they were popular with the public, sold thousands of copies and remain in print today. Ayn Rand was both a novelist (a writer of fiction) and a political and economic theorist; she has been aptly called a philosophical novelist.

Having seen her family and society destroyed by Communist collectivism and terror, it is not surprising that she strenuously opposed them and advocated individualism and its economic manifestation, capitalism. Neither is it surprising that she thought the best place to find these virtues was the United States. And, likewise, it is not surprising that, when she saw those virtues under attack in the United States, she defended them with her powerful pen.

Marx and Lenin divided the world into two groups: (1) the bourgeoisie were the industrial and commercial owners and managers, few in number but great in power; and (2) the proletariat were the workers and farmers, great in number but weak in power. The solution was for the proletariat to rise up in a great revolution, overthrow and destroy the bourgeoisie and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat that governed by the motto, From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Rand anticipated and then recognized the disastrous consequences of the poverty, tyranny and social disintegration the communist ideology created where it was implemented and was very alarmed by the collectivism she saw progressivism creating in America. She saw two groups one small, one large. The first was the people who provide the motor of the world, ... those who produce the goods and ideas that keep the society going, be they industrialists, engineers, artists, scientists, or philosophers that is, the creative individualists. The second was everyone else.

The latter permit, and even demand, the suppression of freedom because they do not value it because they hate the fact that liberty allows some to achieve things others cannot, thereby violating the collectivist ethos of equity. It is not the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about but the alliance between the industrial, academic, entertainment, mass media and political institutions which endlessly attack like stinger bees those who provide the motor of the world with so many rules, regulations, taxes and fees in the name of first one and then another silly cause that the movers and shakers simply quit and disappear, thereby depriving society of the benefits of their work.

The rest are unable or unwilling to engage in creative and productive labor, so the economy collapses, money becomes worthless because there is nothing to buy with it and society degenerates into roving gangs of lawless thugs.

If Ayn Rand could write like this in the 1950s, we can only imagine what she would think of our society, our economy and our politics today. If she, by a miracle, were alive today, she would have seen the Soviet Union collapse, she would have seen China discard the failure of rigid communism in favor of authoritarian mercantilism, she would have seen the failure of the clown regime in North Korea and she would have seen Fidel Castro destroy Cuba and Hugo Chavez destroy Venezuela all examples of collectivism.

Then she would say, Have you Americans completely lost your minds? Have you gone crazy? Why do you want to go down this awful road?

If you want to know who John Galt is, read the 1,168-page book or watch the movies on DVD or by streaming them from YouTube or Prime Video. Itll be time well spent.

Winfield H. Rose taught political science at Murray State University for 39 years and is now retired. He is active in the Calloway County GOP, but speaks here as an individual and not as a representative of either of these organizations. He can be reached at winfieldrose@gmail.com.

Editors Note: Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the editorial opinion of the Murray Ledger & Times.

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Who is John Galt ? | Opinion | murrayledger.com - Murray Ledger and Times