Atlas burned

How amusing. PJ O'Rourke does his best to pan the Atlas Shrugged (Part 1) movie while trying to let down his Rand admiring buddies gently.

Here's his mea culpa paragraph:

Millions of people have read “Atlas Shrugged” and been brought around to common sense, never mind that the author and her characters don’t exhibit much of it. Ayn Rand, perhaps better than anyone in the 20^th century, understood that the individual self-seeking we call an evil actually stands in noble contrast to the real evil of self-seeking collectives. (A rather Randian sentence.) It’s easy to make fun of Rand for being a simplistic philosopher, bombastic writer and—I’m just saying—crazy old bat. But the 20^th century was no joke. A hundred years, from Bolsheviks to Al Qaeda, were spent proving Ayn Rand right.

A rather simplistic take in itself, I would have thought. I mean, O'Rourke himself notes this:

In “Atlas Shrugged” Rand set out to prove that self-interest is vital to mankind. This, of course, is the whole point of free-market classical liberalism and has been since Adam Smith invented free-market classical liberalism by proving the same point. Therefore trying to make a movie of “Atlas Shrugged” is like trying to make a movie of “The Wealth of Nations.” But Adam Smith had the good sense to leave us with no plot, characters or melodramatic clashes of will so that we wouldn’t be tempted to try.

This really gets to what I don't understand: why does anyone need the over-the-top version of Rand's take on self interest and capitalism to believe that capitalism and more-or-less free markets have (in the broad sense) worked well? It seems to me that she took the obvious, inflated it beyond common sense, and then turned it into a cult.

But what really amuses me about the review is that this praise for Rand at the (shall we say) "meta" level clearly does not please the Randheads. One comment simply reads:

Are you reviewing the Movie or just happy to pan the views of Ayn Rand?

And a lengthier one notes:

I find it interesting that a simple truth can be looked upon as so evil a thing byso many; One works hard. One is paid. One’s pay is immediately stolen via a rather shady progressive personal income tax that punishes anyone who actually tries. The more you try, the heavier the punishment. Seems in another age this would be called theft or craven evil by any sane person, but today, to raise objection means castigation.

And on it goes. You get the drift.

There has been controversy about burning the Koran lately. It seems to me if you really want to cause trouble within the American political system, where Randian inspired politicians are on the rise (even though I reckon level of enthusiasm for Rand is inversely proportional to a politician's degree of common sense), have a campaign of Rand book burnings and public denunciations of her philosophy.

It would amuse me, anyway.