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Timely Advice for a Free People

Updated on December 31, 2017

Freedom Must be Maintained

Words to the Wise

"In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit." ~Ayn Rand

Rand Saw it Coming

"In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."

The author of Atlas Shrugged was one who had escaped Soviet communism. Ayn Rand witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution while she was in high school. She watched communist thugs take over her university while she was a college student. While on a trip to America to visit relatives, she decided never to return to the Soviet Union.

Atlas Shrugged is a response to the trends toward collectivism she saw even in mid-twentieth-century America. While Americans seemed content to let their government grow and grow, Ayn had seen what happens when the government takes freedom from the people in exchange for the illusion of security and equality. In the novel, she describes a nation much like the modern United States, in which a large portion of the people live off the productivity of the other portion. In her fictional America, the producers are becoming fewer and fewer while the demands of the moochers (government bureaucrats, and bums) become more onerous by the day.

In the midst of this decay, top industrialists, artists, and thinkers are disappearing. One by one, they simply cannot be found. Some of them destroy their own businesses just before they vanish. One woman, Dagny Taggart, holds out longer than the others. She has built an incredible railroad despite huge obstacles and is determined to hold on no matter what. Read the novel to see if/how she is convinced to join those who decided they were tired of bearing the burden of Atlas.

Rand's Magnum Opus

Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged
Yes, this is a long book. Read it anyway--you will be glad you did. Food for thought.
 

An Observation from Ayn Rand

"Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted."

Libertarians Offer an Alternative

The opposite of the collectivist, Atlas Shrugged world is not anarchy, but liberty. Matt Kibbe sums it up nicely in the title to his latest book, Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff, then elaborates in the pages inside. Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff. Sounds suspiciously like the Golden Rule, doesn't it?

Libertarians believe in a government that stays within the restraints of the Constitution of the United States, not a government that inserts itself into everything in the name of "fairness" or "equality" or "social justice" (as opposed to actual justice.)

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