Detroit and Starnesville: The prophecies of Atlas Shrugged

Over the years, we at the Ayn Rand Institute have often pointed out the uncomfortable parallels between Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged and the crumbling state of the world. Now I’ve just run across two separate articles by others—on the same day, amazingly enough—drawing parallels between Detroit’s recent bankruptcy and the economic ruination depicted in Atlas Shrugged:

• Julie Novak’s article, “The lessons for Australia from Detroit’s painful decline,” points out that the Detroit bankruptcy “is an event seemingly lifted out of an Ayn Rand novel.” She cites government policies (especially those leading to bloated public sector unions, high taxes, and burdensome regulations) as chief causes of Detroit’s problems.

• Daniel Hannan’s article is called “Statism is turning America into Detroit—Ayn Rand’s Starnesville come to life.” The author points to Rand’s “uncannily prophetic description” of a town that “decayed slowly, then collapsed quickly.” Responding to claims that “capitalism has failed us,” Hannan observes that “capitalism is the one thing the place desperately needs. Detroit has been under Leftist administrations for half a century. It has spent too much and borrowed too much, driving away business and becoming a tool of the government unions.”

Both articles quote from the powerful section in Atlas Shrugged in which two of the novel’s protagonists come upon Starnesville, a once-thriving industrial town whose factory has closed, leaving the town a relic of its former self. Here’s part of a much longer description:

A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.

Beyond the town, on a distant hill, stood the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Its walls, roof lines and smokestacks looked trim, impregnable like a fortress. It would have seemed intact but for a silver water tank: the water tank was tipped sidewise.

Kudos to these two writers for noticing the meaningful parallels between Rand’s fiction and the state of the world today—in this case, the link between government limits on economic freedom and the decline of cities. Though I cannot agree with all of the authors’ statements and solutions, they deserve appreciation for pointing out Rand’s relevance. And it should be noted that Rand’s relevance is not confined to political predictions—the meaning of Atlas Shrugged goes far deeper than politics, down to the root of all human action in the choice to use or betray one’s capacity for reason.

By the way, here are links to some of the Ayn Rand Institute’s thinking on the same subject: Debi Ghate’s post on Timothy Geithner seeking wider powers at the height of the financial crisis—an interview with Yaron Brook and his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal—and “The Czars Come to America,” by Onkar Ghate (here and here).

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