might tip over into the kind of accelerating decline described in the middle part of the novel. The seventies had taken a lot of the gloss off the bright and shiny 1968 vision of the future, and having run a small business for the latter part of that sorry decade, the encroachment of ever-rising taxes, regulation, and outright obstruction by governments at all levels was very much on my mind, which, along with the monetary and financial crises created by those policies plus a rising swamp of mysticism, pseudoscience, and the ascendant anti-human pagan cult of environmentalism, made it entirely plausible to me that the U.S.
My next traverse through Atlas Shrugged was a little before 1980. Also, it was 1968, for Heaven’s sake, and I perceived the upheavals of the time (with a degree of naïveté and wrongheadedness I find breathtaking at this remove) as a sovereign antidote to the concentration of power and oppression of the individual, which would set things aright long before productive people began to heed Galt’s call to shed the burden of supporting their sworn enemies. He world of Atlas Shrugged … seemed very remote from that of 1968-we were going to the Moon, and my expectations for the future were more along the lines of 2001 than Rand’s dingy and decaying world. In the review, I noted that what struck me most in reading the book multiple times over the span of more than four decades, was how prescient it was in predicting the social and political trends that played out over the period. This was my fourth time reading the novel: the first was in the summer of 1968, the second in the late 1970s, and the third in 2010, when I wrote a lengthy review of my impressions.
A couple of days ago, I finished re-reading Altas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
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