| | I apologize for posting on-topic here, but I have to take issue with the premise.
If you actually understand the story, you have to ask: Who's quitting? It seems to me that the best and the brightest are all moving to state capitals to enjoy the boom in government. At least, state capitals, and the nation's, are doing well, with high incomes going to people with advanced educations. So it seems.
Of course, we know that all this means is that the wealth is being drained into those entropy pits. It is not productive money.
But if Atlas were shrugging, educated people would not be flocking to government jobs.
Also, if Atlas were shrugging, the apparent problem would not be "unemployment" (so-called) but demands for skilled people.
Moreover, in the book, the point is made that if any businessman had said three (now four) generations ago that he was working for his own profit, not the public good, he would have saved us a lot of grief. Well, the "public be damned" is a misattributed cliche, so it needed to be said more than once. The fact remains that the anti-trust laws, the federal reserve, the income tax, restrictions on gold, etc., etc., there was never a time when the govenrment was short of laws. If that is the standard, then Atlas was always shrugging.
But it is not the standard.
The story is not about growing regulation -- though there is that -- but the response to it.
Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that "Atlas Shrugged" parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.
The world of 2010 is not much different than that of 1957. Economic lunacy was never in short supply. What has been lacking then and now is a response to it.
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"We don't need to make a movie out of [Atlas Shrugged] ... We are living it right now."
