Atlas is shrugging

"We don't need to make a movie out of the book. We are living it right now."

I've added Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged to the sidebar, because it does what a good novel should—through a thrilling story, it tell us about ourselves. I finished reading it for the first time only recently, amidst the bailout extravaganza that has overtaken Washington. Comparing Rand's "fiction" to the "fact" all around me was inevitable; Stephen Moore does the same in his recent WSJ opinion piece, and follows it up with an excellent interview (in which he quotes Hayek!):

Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I don't share Moore's optimism, and neither do I share Rand's. How will we learn when the lessons have been staring us in the face for years, in the forms of books written by thinkers like Tocqueville, Hayek, and Rand? I don't know, but nonetheless I hope that John Galt will appear when we finally realize how badly we need him.

H/T RightCoast, via Insty.