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Atlas Hedged
ATLAS HEDGED....Via Alex Tabarrok, McSweeney's presents "Atlas Shrugged Updated for the Current Financial Crisis":
"Damn it, Dagny! I need the government to get out of the way and let me do my job!"She sat across the desk from him. She appeared casual but confident, a slim body with rounded shoulders like an exquisitely engineered truss. How he hated his debased need for her, he who loathed self-sacrifice but would give up everything he valued to get in her pants ... Did she know?
"I heard the thugs in Washington were trying to take your Rearden metal at the point of a gun," she said. "Don't let them, Hank. With your advanced alloy and my high-tech railroad, we'll revitalize our country's failing infrastructure and make big, virtuous profits."
"Oh, no, I got out of that suckers' game. I now run my own hedge-fund firm, Rearden Capital Management."
Your mileage may vary, especially if you haven't read Atlas Shrugged. I thought it was pretty funny.
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Actually, John Gault was lining up for a government bailout...
I hated, loathed, detested that book, but I wonder: How many CEOs these days could do anything at all with their hands? To be fair, there was one CEO interviewed by Michael Moore (Lee Iacocca?) who actually knew how to change oil, but the execs of Atlas Shrugged are a cartoon, a Republican fantasy, from a bygone era. I daresay that if the top execs from our current crop of super companies started to disappear, things would probably improve.
Pretty funny, but the writing's better than Rand's.
"Oh, no, I got out of that suckers' game. I now run my own hedge-fund firm, Rearden Capital Management."
Had Rand written this it would be a 2 and a half page speech.
Bashing an author who accurately described the culture of American crony capitalism is understandable because of the ideology used to add content to her stories, which Rand also embraced intellectually. However, the recent begging for public bailouts from failing finance and manufacturing CEO's could have come straight from a Rand novel. The Taggart who most resembles the current cast of characters in our national economic tragedy is Dagny's brother James. Ellsworth Toohey, a type increasingly playing a role in American political discourse, could be played by Kristol, O'Reilly or almost any other nationally known pundit. These Rand characters should be the ones used to highlight present day events.
Minor correction: Alex Tabarrok made that post (the guy Tyler Cowen shares the blog with).
Wesley Mouch reminds me of Jack Abramoff.
True dat.
BTW, Who is John Galt? r
I remember reading Atlas Shrugged when I was 14 and having the hots for Dagny Taggart. I remember trying to re-read it when I was 19 and thinking, what was I thinking?
Frightening, the number of people in this country who don't get past 14. Any Ron Paul voters out there?
I read "Atlas Shrugged" quite awhile ago and that was still pretty funny.
Am I remembering correctly that Toohey and most of the other "mediocrities" Rand so despised all died in some horrible train wreck caused by government regulation?
And right in the middle - interrupting what passed with Rand for a sex scene - wasn't there about a 200-page rant on Libertarian values that had nothing to do with the plot?
Not that there was much of a plot.
I always found it ironic that Rand, the nemesis of collectivist ideas, wrote in Atlas Shrugged the literary equivalent of that horrid Soviet architecture - oversized, ugly and poorly constructed.
IIRC, Toohey was actually in her warm-up novel, The Fountainhead.
As for the rant on Libertarian values, yes, you're referring to John Galt's speech -- deliciously skewered by the McSweeney's parody with "Galt went on like this for what seemed to Dagny like hours, until, finally, something he said piqued her interest."
That's Right, most of the conservative types so-called have gotten into manipulating money and disdain those who earn from the formation of new actual produce. BTW, the "Atlas" whose shrugging upsets the Earth - shouldn't that be the workers actually making value, and not the ones who bet on it and buy and resell existing value?
It excited in me a profound need to be left alone to do great works of self debasement while thinking of all those steady and sure women of poise and independence--slaves only to fashionable underthings.
I think it's even funnier if you read it after you read this:
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11...
My local newspaper, the Providence Journal, regularly prints op-eds penned by someone at the Ayn Rand Institute.
Regulation of Fannie & Freddy caused the financial meltdown! Taxes are too high!
I sure hope they aren't paying for this dreck.... oh wait, isn't that Socialism?
Ayn Rand has a lot to answer for, including generations of self important architects who think they're Howard Roark.
John Gault would take his Physics degree, and instead of coming up with a new power source, would be inventing the sequel to Credit Default Swaps.
The people I know who admire this book all think a themselves as Henry Rearden's or John Galt's, but to me they all resemble James Taggart.
Rearden's character was based on Frank Loyd Wright, who was a megalomaniac.