As the super-rich leave, the welfare bill balloons and a nicely turned phrase – “Our national security can’t come at the expense of social security” – betrays priorities, it may be worth revisiting Ayn Rand’s 1957 classic Atlas Shrugged.

The book has sold around 10 million copies, although data is lacking on how many have actually read it. At 1,100 words of occasionally turgid prose, it’s not the easiest read (its philosophical heart is a 70-page speech), but right from the start, it attracted passionate supporters. Today, a signed, first edition will cost you £12,000 (according to AbeBooks).

Despite its length and leaden moments, Atlas Shrugged is a deliberately compelling story with a strong and independent woman, Dagny Taggart, as the protagonist fighting to save her business against an appropriation by an over-bearing government. There’s mystery and passion along the way because, as Rand herself wrote,

“It’s time we realize—as the Reds do—that spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause.”

The challenge was, as biographer Jennifer Burns writes in Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right:

“Rand’s romantic fiction, with its heavy political messages and overdrawn contrasts between good and evil, was hopelessly out of fashion as a vehicle for serious ideas. Atlas Shrugged was a throwback to Socialist realism, with its cardboard characters in the service of an overarching ideology”

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, Jennifer Burns (p178)

Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, for which Atlas Shrugged is the fictional vehicle, has also attracted passionate apostles and detractors. At times it comes across as an extreme and over-wrought reading of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

From Smith’s:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

We get Rand’s

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” (p680)

But read the book and what shines through isn’t an extreme philosophy but simple, rational economics: if you squeeze ever harder on the producers, the creatives, the wealth creators, they will stop working. They will go on strike as in Atlas Shrugged, they will emigrate or will simply decide that there is no marginal benefit in working harder.

That’s a lesson we appear to be re-learning, today.

UK beware.

Photo by Siddhant Kumar on Unsplash