HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ATLAS SHRUGGED

Over at Dr. Sanity on the The Historical Significance of Atlas Shrugged - crossposted from an article at Real Clear Politics.

Dr. Sanity: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ATLAS SHRUGGED

...a German intellectual named Karl Marx gave one of the most influential accounts of the new capitalist system--and he got everything wrong. An Industrial Revolution driven by scientific and technological advances springing from the minds of a few extraordinary individuals, he would describe as the anonymous, collective product of brute physical labor; an economic system of liberty, he would describe as a system of oppression; a system built on the right to property he would describe as a system based of expropriation--and then he would propose actual oppression and expropriation as the solution.

COLE's NOTE: Sort of like some current politicans - such as "Taliban Jack".

Dr. Sanity continues:
Today's left promises wealth and happiness and justice and brotherhood. What they have always delivered is poverty and misery; injustice and death. It will be no different this time around.

Every time I hear the left voicing their utopian aspirations and dreaming their totalitarian dreams, I think about all the victims that will suffer from their selfless virtue. I remember Ayn Rand's heroes and heroines as they struggled to achieve their supposedly "selfish" pursuits; and I think of the words of a contemporary Randian hero, Mal Reynolds, in the movie Serenity, after discovering an entire planet's population has been wiped out as a result of the same kind of selfless utopian motivations:

"Somebody has to speak for these people....Sure as I know anything, I know this, they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, they'll swing back to the belief...that they can make people...better.

And I do not hold to that."

.....The most important intellectual breakthrough that Rand helped me to understand was how the social engineers of the left, motivated as they are by their creative utopian aspirations--expressed by the desire to impose (forcibly, if necessary) universal peace, social justice and brotherhood upon humanity--are completely oblivious to the malignant side of their own natures.

As was once said "The Road to Hell is paved with Good intentions".