Atlas Shrugged

The 1970s and early 80s were a fog to me. I'm sure I heard a lot of memorable songs in the 70s but I just can't remember them. If I hear a good song from my past, I'm sure I will have some precious recollection of it, but I wouldn't know it was from the 70s unless someone told me. Or any of the songs in the early 80s.

Those were my dark days.

It was also a time in my life when I refused to read any books other than my textbooks in my MBA courses at Seattle University and books I needed to be familiar with to advance my career.

That was in all likelihood the real explanation for my refusal to read both "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," by Ayn Rand. I remember my first wife raving about both books, "Atlas Shrugged" in particular. In other words, I did not refuse to read the books just because my first wife had recommended them.

But I'm glad I did not read Ayn Rand and did not become one of her disciples.

The most famous disciple of Rand is Alan Greenspan, the former Fed Chairman, the one whom current Chairman Ben Bernanke succeeded.

Greenspan was the primary architect of the second golden age of America, he was also one of the major civil engineers of the economic collapse of the U.S.

You see, Ayn Rand taught that the best minds in society must be given absolute freedom in their pursuit of profit. Through her philosophy of Objectivism, Rand thought that such talented people would always spearhead society's march towards economic greatness through rational and superior thinking. Through objective and rational thinking, such people would always come up with the best solutions to social and economic problems.

Rand theorized that if the best minds in society went on strike and all retreated to a mountain retreat, the world would collapse. She felt that the best and most talented supported the world, just as the legendary Atlas carried the world on his shoulders and back. And if Atlas balked, or refused to carry the world any longer (shrugged), the world would simply collapse and even implode.

The world therefore owed its life, its existence to those best and brightest minds. Such people must be given absolute freedom to do their work, unfettered by government rules that tend to restrict their activities.

The unsuspecting Rand, then later Greenspan, never imagined the world they would help create.

Greed and excess eventually did the Randian philosophy in.

I read about Derek Jeter's history-making 2722nd hit as a Yankee, eclipsing the record set by Lou Gehrig seventy years ago and forever identifying him as the one who broke the great Gehrig's record. Someday, Jeter may be surpassed by someone else, but it will probably take decades, not years before such a feat happens. Jeter is one superstar who deserves all the accolades he has received in his baseball career.

There are some who like Jeter are deserving of all the hosannas and wealth that society has showered on them, such as Michael Jordan, Roger Federer, Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps, Lance Armstrong and others too many to list, but mainly the superstars of today have overblown accomplishments and certainly not deserving of society's long-term goo-goo eyes.

This, after all, is the age of the overcompensated, overweight "pillars" of society. The CEOs of today's major corporations now make 300 times what the average workers in their respective companies make. In the 1950s and 1960s, when America became far and away the major economic superpower in the world, the CEOs made 12 to 20 times what the average workers in their respective companies made.

How did the CEOs finagle such huge salaries, stock options and other forms of extra compensation for themselves? By closing American plants and relocating their manufacturing in third-world countries. The CEOs managed to increase profitability of their global operations by firing American workers and hiring workers in other countries.

Every thousand-block of American workers fired meant an uptick in the price of a company's shares in the New York Stock Exchange. For such upticks, the CEOs were rewarded with compensation previously reserved only for Eastern potentates.

The banks, investment and insurance companies made a compact. They would sell each other's products so that banks, insurance and investment companies would no longer be distinguishable. All of them would now be known as "financials."

The geniuses in the financial world created mortgage-backed securities and credit swaps that were responsible for the recent subprime mortgage crisis and the recent meltdown in the world economy.

"What?!" Greenspan exclaimed. "The meltdown occurred not as a result of the best and brightest minds going on strike (as in Atlas Shrugged) but because those best and brightest minds did a job on the world economy?" (Quotes from Greenspan were invented by me.)

The U.S. government seemingly was in on the whole farce and charade. From Reagan and Bush, Sr. looking the other way while Japanese manufacturers illegally dumped televisions and other electronic products in the U.S. market to kill American brands like RCA, Zenith, Magnavox and others, to Clinton hurriedly pushing through Nafta, which as Ross Perot had warned would create "a giant sucking sound" of American jobs being lost to Canada and Mexico, to George Bush, who did not see anything wrong with China taking over virtually all manufacturing functions in the U.S. in exchange for China buying up U.S. Treasuries which financed the Iraq War, the true war on terror, the tax cuts for the rich.

Because of the work of the best and brightest minds - not because those minds had gone on strike, as "Atlas Shrugged" had envisioned - the U.S. is now a basket case, whose problems are more gargantuan and worse than the problems faced by third-world countries like the Philippines.

Most people in the Philippines are used to having nothing. Americans are drifting because their assets have shrunk in value and even their most sacred possession, the embodiment of the American dream - now has a negative value. Many unemployed Americans have exhausted their savings as they wait for the employment picture to show some improvement. As though their lost jobs would ever come back.

There is a looming crisis in commercial real estate in this country, expected to peak as the meltdown in residential real estate is arrested and abated. The showcase for this topsy-turvy world of commercial real estate is the $11 billion City Center project in Las Vegas, the biggest privately-funded real estate development in the U.S. The geniuses who dreamed up this project never imagined that the decade-long boom in Vegas real estate would ever end. This, despite the fact that real estate booms don't last very long and are always followed by busts.

The new U.S. jobs that President Obama promised would be created in the alternative energy industry - what are the chances that such jobs will materialize? China and Europe are so far ahead of the U.S. in alternative energy they see us now as the poachers and not the other way around, which it should be since the alternative energy technology was an American invention.

The best and brightest minds are locked in the struggle between good and evil, between the haves and have-nots, between pure capitalists and the so-called socialists. Very little is being done in partnership. One side opposes what the other side proposes, as if by gut reaction.

The overarching debate on who should bail out the country, however, has recently been settled. It is the American middle class. Once again, the middle class is called upon to rescue the group of prodigal sons and daughters who might be exactly the people that Ayn Rand thought were the pillars of society, the Atlas that carried the world on his shoulders and back.

The middle class has already rescued the banks, the insurance companies, GM and Chrysler. They suspect that they are being asked to rescue the American health care system from eventual bankruptcy. They feel that they and their children are eventually going to be hit hard when the tax man comes a-calling to pay for the trillions in deficits that government has been incurring in record pace.

No, Ayn Rand, was wrong. The real Atlas in American society is not the best and brightest minds. It is the middle class. And recently that real Atlas has shrugged.

It has shrugged on the airwaves, in street demonstrations, in so-called town hall meetings across the country. They're mad as hell, they can't take it anymore.

If they would just drop the racist attacks on Obama, and if they would buck those who have seized on their angst to promote the crazy-quilt of right-wing causes, the rest of the country would take them more seriously.