In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece,
Stephen Moore highlighted the parallels between today’s economic
events and those depicted in Ayn Rand’s classic Atlas
Shrugged.
“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,” Moore wrote. Point taken:
Rand was eerily prescient in predicting the encroachment of big
government during this crisis.
Then again, it doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that
eventually government will go awry. In fact the ultimate riff on
government came out roughly 1,957 years (give or take about 33
years) before Atlas Shrugged, when someone, probably a
clever proto-Objectivist, quipped, “Render unto Caesar the things
which are Caesar’s,” as if to warn us that eventually the
government is going to do what it wants to do, and the rest of us
are better off worrying about more important things.
No, if you are looking for the most complete forecast of today’s
economic and political turmoil in 20th century literature you
will have to look beyond Rand’s one-dimensional economic
vignettes to a work of scope and sophistication: Douglas Adams’s
all-encompassing masterpiece, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy.
Adams prognosticated the current scenario in such detail that it
is hard to know where to begin accounting for his accuracy. But
perhaps a good place would be the election of Barack Obama, who
in Adams’s framework is a giant lizard.
As the alien Ford Prefect explains to the human protagonist
Arthur Dent, an ancient democracy is bound, eventually, to elect
only lizards for its leaders. Why?
Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the
wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
“What?”
“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping
into his voice, “have you got any gin?”
“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”
Ford shrugged again.
“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever
happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of
course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say
it.
Precisely right — in the last election we elected one younger,
slightly more government-loving lizard over another older, slight
less government-loving lizard, and some of us think that the
lizard we ended up with is the best thing ever. They’re
completely and utterly wrong, of course.
Don’t hope for anything better in the next election cycle,
though. Adams distills the underlying flaw of democracy in one
paragraph:
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who
must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to
do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of
getting themselves made President should on no account be
allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary:
people are a problem.
Needless to say, Adam’s explanation of the economic situation is
much more thorough and accessible than Rand’s. Academics, the
media, and especially the recently unemployed have spent
countless man-hours trying to understand the failures of the
wizards of Wall Street to identify properly the enormous risks of
the subprime market in their heretofore impeccable mathematical
models. Adams sums it up in a single sentence: “The major
difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that
cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot
possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be
impossible to get at or repair.”
If only the government had known that encouraging over-leveraged
banks to increase subprime lending could not possibly go wrong.
Where Ayn Rand predicts the burgeoning of government in general,
Adams delves into frightening specifics. With the nursing of the
financial economy entrusted to “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke, who has
credibly promised to be reckless with the money supply, one of
the few stories in HHGTTG actually set on earth seems
particularly relevant.
Arthur Dent discovers, during his time travels, that when the
human race first alights on the planet earth, the first finance
minister solves the pressing question of what to do to get money
by establishing tree leaves as currency (just the kind of
expansionary policy that Bernanke would beam majestically on).
But, we have also run into a small inflation problem on account
of the high level of leaf availability. Which means that I
gather the current going rate has something like three major
deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut. So, um, in order to
obviate this problem and effectively revalue the leaf, we are
about to embark on an extensive defoliation campaign, and um,
burn down all the forests. I think that’s a sensible move don’t
you?
“Yes, we do,” one can imagine the Federal Reserve Board
of Governors crying in response about a year from now when
inflation spikes so quickly they decide that they have no choice
but to burn down the metaphorical forests.
Lastly, Adams captured the defeat of individuality at the hands
of the government with far more poignancy than Rand. The reason
the main character Arthur Dent is forced to hitchhike the galaxy
is that economic planners of the galaxy decide that the Earth
must be removed for the stimulus of an interstellar bypass route.
And we are shocked at the sticker price when our leaders decide
that the market must be sacrificed for a trillion dollars’ worth
of bypasses, bridges and tunnels.
Adams’s illustration is much darker than Rand’s because it
depicts today’s hideousness more faithfully. Adams did, however,
leave us with a saving maxim to see these times through, one
printed directly on the cover of the eponymous Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy: Don’t Panic.
