Finished Atlas Shrugged None Too Soon

Well folks, I finally turned the last page of Ayn Rand's opus "Atlas Shrugged." And apparently, my completion of the book comes at a time that her words scream most loudly. The basis of her novel is free-market capitalism, in a phrase, "leave the good businesses alone, let the market take care of the bad businesses."

Ironically, our latest recession is almost an anachronistic scene out of her novel. Bad businesses are lining up by the dozens to receive a bailout by the federal government. And the government can't deny "helping" these troubled businesses by partially nationalizing them.

How funny is it that Yahoo! Finance is discussing a blog written by Henry Blodget which discusses just this topic. It's titled, "Ayn Rand for Treasury Secretary." I have to take issue with some of the comments on the video suggesting that capitalism "had it's shot" and now government needs to take back over. Today's proliferation of bad leverage and successive reeling in of that debt should not be compared with the choking off of valuable intellectual assets as featured in the book.

In a water shortage, (if you could,) would you supply the water works with more water, or would you "let it fail" due to poor water management? There is a difference in the actions the government is taking to keep our economy going, some good, some not so good. The liquidity injections made by the Fed are not the same as enabling poor business models to keep producing noncompetitive goods. Sort it out, so-called pundits!

Is Obama our John Galt? Not likely, considering he is in support of raising taxes, not abolishing them. Please just let me fund my Roth 401k for another couple of years before jacking our taxes up...

Thank God our current innovators and profiteers aren't disappearing at a breakneck speed. Granted, this isn't the time for private equity firms to dole out money like it's 2005, but enough or our capitalistic society is still intact that I think we've a lot of smart people working very hard to improve this mess we're in.

Still waiting for Galt's electrostatic-motor powered Prius though.