Following is a brief premise of the movie and a revelation between a frightening prediction the movie made, and that prediction becoming reality just four days ago as reported by the New York Times.
The movie Atlas Shrugged Part I is based on Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel that accurately predicted our current sociopolitical downfall as a rapidly expanding number of non-producing individuals in our country continues to feed like leeches upon the hard work, effort and production of others. Facilitated by an expanding federal government, a catastrophic redistribution of wealth smothers all economic growth and production as our massive population of non-producers turns to the government for ever-increasing amounts of money, benefits, government jobs, union protections and more social welfare programs.
Sounds familiar, right? Tough to tell whether I am still talking about the movie or actual current events.
In Atlas Shrugged Part I, we see the initial stages of America’s collapse as the small number of private sector producers struggles to survive as a combination of government regulations, free-market interventions and social engineering topple the last pillars of capitalism and send the country into a poverty-stricken cesspool of socialist equality that parallels the bleakest days of the Soviet breadlines while providing poverty-level equality for all.
A Frightening Parallel
April 20, 2011
The movie focuses on a last-ditch effort by free-market capitalist Dagny Taggart to build a modern railroad line in Colorado that would support the growing production of oil in the area, thus creating one of the few places left in the United States that would produce jobs, wealth and opportunity. Despite our government’s best efforts to derail her plans, she successfully executes the project and a bullet train completes a test run of the new rails setting a new high-speed train record in the U.S., topping out at 250 mph. As a result, companies that need to reliably receive raw materials and ship their products begin moving to Colorado which now has the only functioning railroad line in the country.
Our government responds to her success by passing legislation that makes it illegal for companies to move to Colorado. In our governments view, it is unfair that employees will be left behind by these companies moving to Colorado and that it’s every company’s responsibility to take care of their employees and not be greedy by moving to states where the business climate is better for them to operate in.
Unreal, and very frightening. Imagine a government that could dictate to a private corporation where it can build a factory and where it can’t. That is outright, blatant socialism and has never happened before in the history of the United States. When this finally happens it will signal the beginning of the end of the United States.
Scary stuff…but it’s just a movie, right?
Wait…
Just four days ago on April 20, 2011, the New York Times reports that “The National Labor Relations Board under President Obama…filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to force Boeing to bring an airplane production line back to its unionized facilities in Washington State instead of moving the work to a nonunion plant in South Carolina. “
I guess it’s too late. Now the government can prevent private companies from expanding or moving their production. We have swallowed the entire Socialist agenda and are well on our way to full implementation.
Continue to support the Socialist Democrat and Republican politicians at your own peril. It is only a matter of time until Atlas Shrugged isn’t a movie, but a documentary that future generations watch to learn how the United States collapsed.
Categories: Big Brother, Gov't Workers & Unions, Movie Review, Socialism, Welfare State
Angrywoodchuck's Blog 
For Boeing, when it comes to union, is the employment at will like a regular employment? or it has a binding contract that the employer cannot lay off union workers when labor force is not needed. it is just hard to believe how gov’t can step into a business decision, if that’s the case, the gov’t can stop companies from laying off people during recession so that we don’t have to worry about unemployment.
Union employment is not “at-will” like those of us in the private sector. This is one of the big problems with Unions in general. The employer can not just lay-off or fire a Union employee. There is a whole process they have to go through, usually drawn out in the Union contract and agreement that is binding. This is the same problem with teacher’s Unions and why there are so many horrible teachers still teaching. The process to eliminate them is so time-consuming and costly that most schools just suck it up and let them keep working.
Unions once had a purpose, but that purpose no longer exists. Now they just represent bloated, forced-due thieves that use those member dues to spend as political machines to keep politicians in their pocket and in office. Politicians that will keep giving them whatever they ask for in return for support come election time. The entire system is crooked and corrupt.
As a general rule, I don’t mind Unions so much in the private sector. Private sector Unions have been diminishing steadily for decades and now make up a very small part of the private labor force. This is mainly due to their greed. They have systematically destroyed the host companies they leech off of like viruses, demanding ever greater amounts of pay and benefits and health care and pension packages until the company’s costs were so high that they could no longer charge a competitive price for their product or service in the marketplace and were subsequently destroyed by their competition that does not have such high union costs or has no union labor at all. Such is the life cycle of the blood-sucking Union virus, eventually terminating its host.
When public sector Unions were allowed to form thanks to John F. Kennedy in the 60’s, we really shot ourselves in the foot. I put the idea of allowing government workers to unionize as one of the greatest failures of our time. There is no competition for government so therefore no “natural predator” that can keep its growth under control. Government Unions can grow forever and ever and ever with exponentially expanding pay and benefits and health care and pensions because the government has the taxpayer to provide the “deep-pocket” funding the viruses need to keep their party going. Only when we wake up to the Gov’t Union dead-rot destroying our country from within will we put an end to this infectious disease and get to keep more of our own hard-earned money.
And as a final thought…private Unions are acceptable because they do, eventually, snuff themselves out…unless a pro-Socialist government such as ours decides to bail them out. For example, General Motors and Chrysler, (which in a prior post I pointed out was less than 0.1% of the workforce at the time-it wasn’t how many that Obama wanted to bail out…it was WHO he wanted to bail out…the UNIONS) or in the case of this post, trying to force Boeing back to its Union plant. Now we have the worst of both worlds. It’s bad enough we have Government Unions bleeding us dry, but now we have a government protecting the private sector Unions as well. Unions that should be doing us all a favor and offing themselves on a regular basis until there are none left. Thanks Big Gov!