I’ve done my best to hydrate Anna, but she’s flagging.
I can barely keep my eyes open, but I can’t trust a motel not to report us. I don’t feel secure enough to pull over for coffee. The only reliable way to wake up is for me to spot a police car—they charge my heart like an electric prod.
I must be going through digital withdrawal. I think of all the emails and photos and movies that pass through me as I drive through rivers of Wi-Fi. They talk to me.
ATLAS AIN'T HALLIBURTON, XE, OR ANY 'SECURITY CONTRACTOR'And I picture John Galt & the Gang in Atlas Shrugged, fearlessly fending off pointy-headed bureaucrats as I contemplate all the corporations that are trying to track me for the Feds. (Nothing personal, of course.)
I dread to think what Ayn Rand would have thought of Halliburton—or any of the companies that foster and feed off big government today. (She’d have rejoiced in the freakish primacy of Steve Jobs—an exception that proves the rule.)
I realize now that big bureaucracies of any kind are the problem. Any organizational threshing machine is a menace, whether it’s public or private. They all spy on us, despise us, atomize us.
What would Ayn Rand say today about her failure? Her acolyte Alan Greenspan turned the Federal Reserve into a private investment pump. The business world is run by men she would have despised. Their enterprises feed off a state whose overseers take orders from CEOs. It’s a merger made in hell, corporatism without obvious ranting villains like Hitler and Mussolini.
Ayn Rand: Used & Abused
Ayn Rand would see that her life’s work has been abused, that she’s become a seductive fig leaf for corporatism. Her mystique, born of a hunger to escape and counter Russian Leninism, has become the face of a fraud: We fantasize about limitless freedom as we descend into the depressing reality of an authoritarianism born of the unholy union of government and monolithic ‘free enterprise’ that strangles competition.
Libertarians have been hoodwinked by Rand’s glorious entrepreneurial romanticism into accepting a tsunami of armed corporatism that drowns us in surveillance and control.
This is worse than any virus. It would break Rand’s passionate heart. Wake up!
I just passed some big grinning pumpkins. I think I’m late, but: Happy Halloween, friends.