Atlas Shrugged (Again)

Sales of Atlas Shrugged are way up, apparently, what with the cascading bank failures and the impending economic doom and everything. Though I’m fond of the book (every teenage libertarian goes through that Randian phase, I think), I think that Megan nails the strength and weakness with the book (and Rand’s writing in general):

she’d seen what an economy looked like while it was being wrecked. All of Rand’s writing is dominated by the fact that she lived through the birth pangs of Soviet Russia, and saw her family’s business destroyed by Lenin’s ideology, and extraordinarily incompetent economic management. Her philosophy does not work, at least if by work we mean generate a framework by which a person or society can order itself. But she was actually a really very gifted observer, and she had a quite subtle understanding of how all the interconnected elements of an industrial economy fit together. It’s a pity she didn’t quite get how human beings worked, especially herself.

Full disclosure: I know Megan and her suitor, Peter; indeed, I was just at their house last night. This in no way affected my endorsement of her analysis of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.