It has been a while since I actually read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, but I did recently rewatch the film adaptation… which I think is rather good, despite the 5.6 rating on IMDB for the first part of trilogy. (It is low-budget, and they did change the actors for most major roles from film to film, but you get used to it.) Actually we supported the film series on Kickstarter (I think it was) way back when, and for that even got a movie poster signed by two of the writers.
If you don’t know the story, in a nutshell, all the competent people of America go on strike, retreating to a community in Colorado started by the mysterious John Galt. Meanwhile, the rest of the country basically collapses, as a corrupt government nationalizes industries (doing everything “for the public good”), and the type of people left in industrial power are the sort that refuse to take responsibility for anything. The novel is a sort of libertarian revenge fantasy. Imagine if all the honest and competent people, who hold up the whole world by their efforts, but who have been long abused by the state and many others in society, could just leave all those corrupt moochers behind and LET THEM DIE. Basically.
But I had the thought that Elon Musk is very much like a real-life Henry Rearden. Rearden, in the novel, is one of the competent people, an industrialist who invents “Rearden Metal”. The government at first declares his metal unsafe and encourages people not to use it, unionized rail workers refuse to drive trains over it, and so on. In response, he and Dagny Taggart (another competent person, and the main character of the story actually, who runs the Taggart Transcontinental railroad), build a new train line and bridge using the metal, and ride over it themselves, proving everyone wrong.
Not even skipping a beat, contradicting and ignoring everything they said before about it being unsafe, once the metal is demonstrated, the government instead tries to, basically, confiscate the metal for their own purposes! They pass a law that gives them the right to say who gets the metal when (the “Fair Share Law”), which Rearden ignores, and then they force him to sign over the patent to the state (by blackmailing him). For a snip, here is Rearden’s “trial” for the former sin, gives you some sense of the movie (should start at 2:34).
Anyway, that all came to mind because…. speaking of the government completely changing its tone on the product of a successful industrialist:
With a nice follow-on by Marc Andreessen (actually quoting another essay written by Ayn Rand).
And Mike Solana is almost certainly correct here - Musk’s real crime, far as the state is concerned, is operating a popular free speech platform. They hate free speech. He must be destroyed. (Take that away and he is a brilliant green-energy and spaceflight guy and they adore him.)
THE END
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Not about Musk, but about the general theme of nonsensical government reversals, I read the below item a few days ago.
https://pacificlegal.org/tornado-forecasting-was-banned-in-the-u-s-for-60-years-why/
A tweet-sized quote: "From 1887 to 1950, the U.S. government banned the word “tornado” from weather forecasts. Warning the public about possible tornadoes would cause panic, officials said. It was better to avoid the word altogether."