Атлас расправил плечи...

[alexpgp]

So reads the title of the Russian language edition of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I picked up a copy, read the first page, but the experience did not impel me to buy the book. (After all, I know how it ends.)

One of the recurrent motifs of the novel is the politicization of the national economy as the "men of the mind" went on strike. Getting hired and fired came to depend on who you knew or who you offended, success often depended on having "pull," mushrooming government engaged in micromanagement driven by political and not economic considerations, and so on.

So when I read that a decision to close a GM dealership in Minnesota was reversed after lobbying a U.S. Senator while other profitable dealerships are still going to be shut down, I could not help but look over at my dog-eared paperback version of Rand's book and wonder if, perhaps, it might be time to read it again with a new perspective.

Who you know and having an "in" is a universal factor everywhere, but to the extent it becomes the determining factor in the economic equation (outweighing merit, industriousness, and initiative), life becomes more difficult for everyone.

Cheers...

Comments

[silpol.livejournal.com]

madame Rand had been Russian in first place - Алиса Зиновьевна Розенбаум...

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

What kind of "student of Objectivism" (former or otherwise) would I be if I did not know that? :^)

As an aside, I find it... curious that some Russians with whom I've had the opportunity to discuss Rand's ideas insist vehemently she is not Russian, but Jewish. (Or at least I did until I became familiar with the whole национальность dynamic that seems to pervade, um, Russian thought.)

Cheers...

[silpol.livejournal.com]

well, I'm not exactly _that_ much Russian - my identity somehow got stuck in USSR times, and part of it left together with whole USSR thing :)

moreover, having somewhat a crowd of Russians here in Helsinki area - I often fail to be part of that community while my main language is still Russian, even if I talk more English daily and crowd around is mostly Finnish one...

and had I said before that my (now passed away) grandfather and my father are both from tangibly-antisemitic segment of Russians, while I had been rather on opposite side, just didn't bother them with me being somewhat different ;)

but I digress... when I've read this book first time few years ago, I had strange feeling - I had skipped it a lot (same as I skipped a lot in reading Tolstoy's Война и мир during mandatory reading during school time), but... when I "closed" book, I couldn't stop to notice around of me and further global (as far I can see from my village on the shore of Finnish puddle gulf) same little silver bells ringing more and more...

and now I try to resist to see more and more parallels from that book around of me, while they are less and less subtle...

somehow that book makes me too much inclined into philosophy, and it might be not so good to be "too much philosophical" in this kind of times.

[silpol.livejournal.com]

just to clarify - technically I'm half-Ukrainian/half-Russian in no particular order (at least in terms of that национальность thingie), but as I said, significant part of me left there in USSR (at least in good part of USSR) and now I fail to "attach" myself _both_ to Ukrainian and Russian cultural/national/etc cloud and... it doesn't make life easier but neither I cry for that ;)