The U.S. economy is crumbling. Businesses are collapsing in record numbers. Jobs have disappeared. Tax revenues are down dramatically. Coincidence?

Everything happening today under Obama resembles the storyline of Ayn Rand’s famous book, Atlas Shrugged, one of the most popular books of all time, selling over 7 million copies. Now, under President Obama, Atlas Shrugged has come to life. Rand prophesized a country dominated by socialists, Marxists and statists, where looters, free loaders and poverty promoters live off the productive class. To rationalize the fleecing of innovative business owners and job creators, the looter class demonized the wealthy, just as Obama and his socialist cabal are doing in real life today.

The central plot of Atlas Shrugged is that in response to being demonized, over-taxed, over-regulated, and punished for success, America’s business owners were disappearing — dropping off the grid, and refusing to work 16-hour days to support those unwilling to put in the same blood, sweat and tears. They were going on strike. Because of that the original proposed title of “Atlas Shrugged” was “The Strike.”

They were going on strike to teach that civilization cannot survive when people are slaves to government. That without a productive class of innovative business owners willing to risk their own money and work 16-hour days, weekends and holidays, there are no jobs and no taxes to pay for government. If you punish the wealthy, the risk-takers, the innovators, you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. In Obama’s America, fiction is becoming fact.

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Whether you agree with Ayn Rand’s philosophy or not, her novel Atlas Shrugged has touched the lives of millions and influenced many of today’s center-right thinkers. The Wall Street Journal noted this morning:

Book sales for “Atlas” have always been brisk—and all the more so in the past few years, as actual events have mirrored Rand’s nightmare vision of economic collapse amid massive government expansion.

Rand’s belief in the primacy of the individual over the collective has garnered her vilification from some on the Right and many, especially, on the Left.

Yet, there is no denying that Atlas Shrugged’s portrayal on the devolution of society at the hands of the Left was prescient as it was one of the most cogent attacks on the excesses of liberalism. Today, it seems as though the lines of fiction and reality have blurred in our nation.

Tomorrow, the film Atlas Shrugged, Part One opens nationwide, which is a faithful adaptation of Part One of her 1957 novel.

Today, we offer you, Atlas is Shrugging, a new short film by Ben Howe.

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Scott Powell, in today’s Investors Business Daily:

‘Atlas Shrugged” — Ayn Rand’s fourth and last novel, published in 1957 — may be second to the Bible as the most influential book read in America, according to a Library of Congress survey. It is required reading in management training at BB&T, the 12th-largest bank in the U.S. and one that resisted taking TARP bailout funds.

Since the Obama administration took office, “Atlas Shrugged” has been enjoying a renaissance with rising sales and library waiting lists, partly because it explains our current economic woes more straightforwardly than most of what we hear from today’s experts.

What happened in Rand’s narrative is coming to pass today, with an anti-business administration reviling private industry and capitalizing on crisis to expand and redirect investment within and between sectors of the economy — setting quotas, prices and compensation.

Businesses responded by retrenching — ceasing to invest, innovate and expand. Whole industries contracted, closed down or moved offshore, much like the U.S. gas and oil drilling industry is doing today. Then, just as now, management became frustrated, discouraged and reluctant to create jobs in an environment of excessive government meddling.

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Recent headlines seem lifted directly out of an Ayn Rand novel. President Obama decries the “fat cat bankers on Wall Street”. Harry Reid attacks insurance companies for making too much profit. House Democrat leaders call Tea Partiers “Racist, Nazi, Gun Nuts”.  How about this nauseating statement made by Army General George Casey after the Muslim terrorist attack on Ft. Hood?

As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well

Each of these headlines might well have been uttered by an Ayn Rand character. Rand, whose father’s pharmacy was confiscated by the Soviets during the communist revolution of 1917, and who came to America in 1926, seems uniquely able to speak to us about the inverted morality of our times. Virtue is to be apologized for. Depravity commands respect. Success is cast as evil and punished while failure is blamed on others and rewarded. Rand’s insights into the psychological state of collectivists—those who demand that we sacrifice our individual freedom and happiness for the sake of the state—explain what often seems incomprehensible to thinking people.

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