Atlas Shrugged Hits Big Screen

Helen Whalen Cohen

Townhall - It took a few tries, but Ayn Rand’s magnum opus is finally coming to the big screen. On Tax Day (appropriately), Atlas Shrugged will show in over three hundred theaters. The book tells a story about the importance of entrepreneurs and the free markets in which they thrive. It poses the question: what if the most productive people stopped producing?

What if they became so fed up by regulations and crony capitalism that they went on strike? The story takes place in a dystopia, in which intellectual elites team up with government bureaucrats to make the most successful people less so, all in the name of equal opportunity. What this amounts to is crippling regulation and handouts to less successful but better-connected business owners. The “anti-dog eat dog rule,” which forbids competition in some parts of the country and is meant as a favor to a bumbling business owner, is one example. Another is the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, which forbids anyone from owning more than one business and is aimed at a particularly successful industrialist. In both cases, the regulators claimed that the rules were needed to keep the little guy from being crushed by big business. The real purpose, though, was to transfer wealth from those who had earned it to those who wanted it. Read full column here: News New Mexico

Atlas Shrugged Hits Big Screen