We’re only two years shy of the 60th birthday of the publication of Atlas Shrugged. My, how time flies. And how we are reminded that its flight is circular.
For even though plain good sense provides adequate vaccination against the ravages of Ayn Rand’s novel, every few years it rises again to infect at-risk segments of the population—those who’ve neglected basic mental hygiene.
You remember the insistently adolescent plot, no? —In a nutshell, it is this: there exist Special people, each an Atlas bearing the weight of the world. These are not merely the heroes of the book, they are its target audience. As Thomas Mallon notes, the book whispers, “You’re right, they’re wrong; you’re special, they’re not.”
These heroes’ labor is pitifully unfair, for all that they seem to be specially favored: “The greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders.”
Special People should be deferred to, or what use is being special? In Atlas Shrugged’s view, the Special People are always and forever plagued by Takers. These weak and bungling rodent-like creatures, (like a certain Kenyan President we shall not mention), though fecklessly incompetent, are also somehow irresistibly powerful.
The pathetic Takers hold this power because of just one thing. They do not properly defer.
In response to this insufferable tyranny posed by the weak’s lack of reverence for them, the Makers light out for the Territory. There they plot their redesign of society along cleaner lines, presumably a place where statues to themselves will be erected.
The novel’s original title was The Strike. And a strike in reverse is what these industrialists (now there’s a word you don’t have much occasion to use these days) envision. Owners against workers. What, they rage at the ungrateful Takers, did you think we would carry you forever?
The strike is not over better conditions, or remedy of any particular grievances, but rather, the demand that everyone just shut up while I am talking. Acknowledge me as a hell of a lot smarter and more special than you.
We are currently experiencing a particularly distressing flareup of Atlas-Shruggism. Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, et al, have skirled up the wambulance sirens over ungrateful Takers and Moochers who cannot be convinced to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Let this be a warning, they say. The Makers don’t want to, but they may be forced—a person can only take so much—to show the drones, as my aunt would say, “where the bear shit in the buckwheat.”
But there’s something unusual afoot this time round.
Because the same Romney who claimed undeserving envy was all there was behind talk of income inequality, has recently shyly declared people "deserve rising wages.” With a straight face, Paul Ryan has professed concern that “most families worry about making ends meet.”
Think about that for a minute. Are they indulging in irony? Paradox? Contradiction?
What happened to the harder you work, more you’ll succeed? Work hard and smart and get ahead? No one who doesn’t work hard ever gets ahead? Could it be that in our age of hypermagically omnipotent finance, these comforting axioms have begun banging into one another like so many bumper cars?
Let’s see, now.
The harder you work, the more you’ll succeed. The bottom 60% of all Americans make just 95¢ for every dollar they made in 1979.
Work hard and smart and get ahead. The 20% just above the bottom 60% only make $1.02 for each dollar they made 35 years ago.
On the other hand, the top 5% make $1.53 for each dollar they made in 1979. The top 10% of “earners” make almost half of all the money paid out.
So maybe everything’s okay. It’s just that the whole bottom four-fifths of everybody just isn’t pulling their weight. That’s what Ryan and Romney claimed during their campaign. Maybe the chickens have finally come home to roost for the Takers. Maybe it’s still true: No one who doesn’t work hard ever gets ahead. And you folks are just not working hard enough to be like us folks.
Except. Except that most of rich folks’ wealth, almost 75%, comes from capital gains and dividends. Which is return on money they didn’t have to work for. Because they already had it.
But so what? Here’s another truth the Makers have told us again and again: Government shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers. These imbalances must be some dysfunction in the system—or, wait a minute, this just occurred to me—must be the result of something Obama has done!
Yet there is this. Capital gains and dividends, the source of most of the income of the wealthiest, are taxed at a much lower rate than “labor.” In other words, the Makers pay a lower percentage of the money they didn’t work for, to support a system that disproportionately favors them. Nice work if you can get it. And you can’t.
Furthermore, the wealthy can, and do, hire lobbyists, fund institutes to come up with policies that benefit them, and invisibly underwrite the campaigns of politicians, who in turn deny any resultant influence while making sure the fix stays in, extending tax breaks, subsidies, and relief from oversight to those who already run the place.
The winners and losers have already been picked. Government’s task is to ensure the perpetuation of the pick.
Mitt Romney spoke for the Makers when he remarked about one half of the citizens of the country he proposed to lead, “My job is not to worry about those people.“
That, my friends, is how the House refers to the marks.
So, we ask: Who could blame “those people” if they just walked away?
Don’t they have ample reason to collectively shrug, and just refuse to continue, if the rules mean they are condemned to be irresistibly ground down playing against the house edge?
Why would their support continue, for a system in which most everybody who doesn’t got squat isn’t likely to, no matter how sore their backs or feet are at the end of the day, no matter how many shifts they take, no matter how many hours they put in?
To the Kochs and Walkers and Santellis of the world, they are slackers born of slackers to breed other slackers, and don’t deserve the little end of nothing they’ve got. This is a predator-prey world, and to these Special people the lower classes are chumps born to provide nourishment.
And, don’t forget, deference.
But what if they just stopped? Stopped paying deference, stopped trying to beat the house, walked away from the table?
Who could blame them for just not participating any longer? What reason would there be for them not to go on strike against an economy that is neither ‘broken’ nor ‘misaligned’ nor ‘dysfunctional,’ but performing perfectly the task it is designed for—making sure the house keeps its advantage?
What could keep the suckers from finally saying, “What, did you think we would keep playing this losing game forever?”
The hell with whining Atlas. Hephaestus should shrug.