It is amazing how Rand saw the future of the United States so clearly. I am afraid we have passed the tipping point. We have been trading in IOU's in place of money for to long. The notice of account overdrawn seems unavoidable. On a happy note check out Governor Luis Fortuno of Puerto Rico. When he took office in 2009 60% of the islands budget was deficit spending today it is around 20%. How?
He started by cutting all salaries including his own by about 15%. He then engaged the unions to renegotiate their salaries.
The ones that cooperated still have their members working. As to those that didn't, well he ended up firing 17,000 government employees. Now there's a man we could use in DC!

I've been seeing our culture in "Atlas Shrugged" since Nixon's time, and it's only been getting worse. The tipping point is approaching rapidly, I'm afraid. And what's worse is the denial so many people harbor.

"Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982, and I'm grateful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her. All of my work had been empirical and numbers-based, never values-oriented. I was a talented technician, but that was all. My logical positivism had discounted history and literature -- if you'd asked me whether Chaucer was worth reading, I'd have said, "Don't bother." Rand persuaded me to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think. This broadened my horizons far beyond the models of economics I'd learned. I began to study how societies form and how cultures behave, and to realize that economics and forecasting depend on such knowledge -- different cultures grow and create material wealth in profoundly different ways. All of this started for me with Ayn Rand. She introduced me to a vast realm from which I'd shut myself off."

~Alan Greenspan; From The Age of Turbulence, pp. 51-53~

It astounds me to this day that Greenspan claimed to be influenced by Ayn Rand...but consider what he say's here:

"One contradiction I found particularly enlightening. According to objectivist precepts, taxation was immoral because it allowed for government appropriation of private property by force. Yet if taxation was wrong, how could you reliably finance the essential functions of government, including the protection of individuals' rights through police power? The Randian answer, that those who rationally saw the need for government would contribute voluntarily, was inadequate. People have free will; suppose they refused?"

Greenspan could not help but reveal his true motives and truly, in terms of his assertion he was influenced by Ayn Rand, all one has to do is read Atlas Shrugged and compare Greenspan to Wesley Mouch. As Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan rose to the prominence of economic dictator just as Mouch had done. As that dictator Greenspan suppressed the interest rate to stay way below the rate of inflation making any notion of a savings account in a bank a stupid idea. Greenspan contributed greatly to the consumer nation we are now witnessing. If one looses money by saving it then it only makes sense to spend it, or invest it. Far too many spent the money rather than invest it, and now here we are.

Greenspan is only a microscopic example of the dystopian future Rand predicted.

It gets more true each time you read it. Doesn't it, Bill?

I am on the second read. I am starting to see the blatant contradictions in the US governement regardless of party affiliation.

I re-read "1984" in 2004, and made the comment that Orwell hit it right on, except 20 years later. Read "Atlas Shrugged" for the first time when hype about the movie started circulating, and am appalled at how closely it resembles today's society. I agree with others that the tipping point is rapidly approaching, if not already here.

http://atlasshruggeddocumentary.com/ a Documentary that shows the prophesy of Atlas Shrugged.

I know exacly what you mean. I have been re-reading several of the old classics of my youth; Atlas Shrugged, Orwell's 1984 & Animal Farm, Huxley's Brave New World, More's Utopia - the prescience of these authors is amazing.

Read it for the first time 3 years ago, but have held the values for many years. Found it disturbing how well some of the people justified their actions, and those of the government, with comments you can hear every day on the news. Unfortunatley, even many of those who profess to believe in those values reveal themselves to be hypocrites far too often. They're happy to mooch, just don't want to have anyone mooching off of them.

the first time I read it, I liked the plot, the second time, i dug into the details, the third time i saw the future. Next time I read it, WE THE PEOPLE HOPE THE NON-THINKERS will be HISTORY!

It is far from over. We need to flush many politcians and burecrats down the commode. America can survive Obama. He is powerless if we Go Galt.