I refuse to read the atheistic Ayn Rand. Whether Paul Johansson‘s film, Atlas Shrugged, Part 1 (2011), is faithful to Rand’s novel I don’t know, but in fact the movie more or less stands on its own. I reviewed it on this site years ago and I find it faulty but worthwhile.

Now what engages my mind is how relevant AS is to America in 2020. That a railroad company makes copious money because trains are the only affordable means of transportation in a blighted U.S. economy is an odd conceit, but not odd at all is the tendency of government to throw its weight around. In the face of a blighted economy it does this (of course), as it does today in America. But it is not done only through legislation. The decision of the movie’s State Science Institute to declare Hank Reardon’s metal unsafe may be the equivalent of the Veterans Health Administration concluding that hydroxychloroquine is a worthless drug against COVID-19. This, I believe, is a lie with respect to people who show COVID-19 symptoms for the first seven days, but the VA fecklessly wants to discredit Donald Trump for promoting hydroxychloroquine (plus azithromycin). The dystopia we have in today’s U.S. is, lamentably, not much different from that which exists in Atlas Shrugged, Part 1.