I bet he didn't even read the book
Because I like posting flamebait, here's Matthew Yglesias, on a column by Carol Baum comparing the financial CEOs to the protagonists in Atlas Shrugged:
Atlas Shrugged is a stupid book, Ayn Rand is a stupid woman, and John Galt’s ideas are stupid. That said, none of them are nearly this stupid. Rand’s novel isn’t about a world in which executives who build companies based on a lot of incorrect decisions, then pay themselves millions of dollars while bankrupting their firms, then come to the government hat-in-hand asking for bailouts, then find that the bailers-out want to attach some strings to their hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds and then go to hide out in Galt’s Gulch. That doesn’t make any sense at all.
Rand-bashing aside, Yglesias is correct.
To inject flamebait of my own, I've read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (albeit many years ago) and while I think Rand has compelling ideas and understand why many libertarians are drawn to her philosophy, I really don't . . . get it. She is not, in my opinion, a particularly great fiction writer.
Atlas Shrugged is a stupid book, Ayn Rand is a stupid woman, and John Galt’s ideas are stupid. That said, none of them are nearly this stupid. Rand’s novel isn’t about a world in which executives who build companies based on a lot of incorrect decisions, then pay themselves millions of dollars while bankrupting their firms, then come to the government hat-in-hand asking for bailouts, then find that the bailers-out want to attach some strings to their hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds and then go to hide out in Galt’s Gulch. That doesn’t make any sense at all.
Rand-bashing aside, Yglesias is correct.
To inject flamebait of my own, I've read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (albeit many years ago) and while I think Rand has compelling ideas and understand why many libertarians are drawn to her philosophy, I really don't . . . get it. She is not, in my opinion, a particularly great fiction writer.