Atlas Shrugged, Now Playing in Zimbabwe

If you haven't read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and you're waiting for a movie version, here's something faster. Read this first-person account of what's going on in Zimbabwe by Zimbabwean-born journalist Douglas Rogers in today's Los Angeles Times.

Ayn Rand's 1957 masterpiece illustrates with murder-mystery-style suspense what happens to a society that abuses and bleeds its productive people in order to support its unproductive people.

If you haven't read the book, click here to get a copy. Don't ask anybody. Don't tell anybody. Don't take anybody's word for it. Think for yourself.

In Atlas Shrugged, the society's leading industrialists and best minds are disappearing. One day they are hard at work in their factories and at their desks, the next they have vanished. No one knows why or where they have gone. But as they are replaced by people who lack their genius, their work ethic, and their vision, the companies they ran so profitably gradually collapse.

The government officials tighten their chokehold on the productive people who remain.

And then more of them vanish. And more industries collapse.

At the end of the book, the lights go out in New York City.

Now, read this excerpt from Douglas Rogers' account in today's paper:

It is the gradual collapse of Zimbabwe's once-sound infrastructure, however, that shocked me most since my last visit 18 months ago. There have been fuel shortages since 2001, but now electricity cuts leave many parts of the country without power several hours a day. The government and state press routinely blame this on "international sanctions" and Western "sabotage." The charge is laughable. There are no international sanctions - only travel bans on leading members of the ruling party, known as the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front.

What's really happened is that many of the country's power turbines have broken down, and the state has neither the foreign currency to buy the spare parts nor the technicians to fix them. (An estimated 4 million Zimbabweans, including a huge number of the country's most skilled workers, have left.) Zimbabwe also imports 40% of its energy from South Africa, Mozambique and Congo, and it cannot afford to pay its bills, hence the blackouts. "What did we do before candles?" goes the local joke. "Electricity!"

Rogers reports that the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe is over 70 percent and the currency is so eaten away by inflation that a beer costs $150,000:

How did Zimbabwe get to this point? It began in the late 1990s when, in order to pay for a costly military incursion into civil war-torn Congo, President Robert Mugabe ordered the printing of vast amounts of money, and inflation climbed steeply.

But it has reached today's levels only since the commercial farm invasions, in which 4,000 out of 4,500 white commercial farmers were kicked off their land, beginning in 2000. White farmers accounted for an estimated 60% of the country's foreign currency earnings through the export of tobacco and other crops. The invasions not only crippled domestic production, they scared away foreign investment. To dig itself out of debt and pay its bills, the government has simply printed more money.

Meanwhile, production by "new farmers" - landless peasants who moved in to occupy the white farms - is pitifully low. Part of the reason is that although the government offers fuel and maize-seed subsidies to new farmers, many have discovered that it's more profitable to sell the maize seed and fuel on the black market for inflated prices than to use them on the farm. Millions of acres of once-productive commercial farmland lie fallow. Of course, the government then blames drought, even though the rains have been good.

The lesson here is that Sir William Blackstone, 18th century legal scholar and a major influence on the framers of the U.S. Constitution, was right when he said the fundamental rights are life, liberty and property. Private property is the foundation of freedom. If everything you have can be seized by the government and given to people who need it more, you are not free. You are enslaved to the needs of people you can't control and you are subject to financial destruction at the whim of government officials.

A free country protects private property. That's how it stays a free country.

Does it seem unfair that some have much and others have little?

What's the alternative?

In those places where the government owns everything and hands it out, there is a bloody struggle for control of the government amid gradually declining production.

In Iraq, where the government owns the oil and the oil industry, where the government owns all the important industries and effectively hands out all the jobs, the Iraqi Shiites are at war with the Iraqi Sunnis.

In the Palestinian territories, there are 140,000 people on the government payroll and the Palestinians affiliated with Hamas are at war with the Palestinians affiliated with Fatah.

In Venezuela, where leftist Hugo Chavez is threatening to establish a "popular economy" that amounts to Soviet-style socialism, an industrial leader told the Los Angeles Times "that the business climate was abysmal, and that factory production, industrial jobs and private investment had plummeted since Chavez took power in 1999."

In Zimbabwe, where knowledgeable farmers were thrown off their land, the government supporters who were handed the farms are selling their government-subsidized seed for cash as the economy craters.

You might call this the myth of benevolent government: the idea that a government can somehow find it in its heart to take care of people, either by "asking" productive people to "pay their fair share" or by telling productive people that the fruits of their labor belong to all the people.

Government is not rhetoric, George Washington reportedly said, government is force.

Limit the power of government and protect private property -- it is history's lesson for those who wish to live in freedom and prosperity. If we want to succeed in Iraq, we should pressure the Iraqi government to privatize the state-owned enterprises. That's the answer.

Copyright 2006

Editor's note: You might be interested to read "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq: Blackstone's Fundamental Rights and the Power of Property" at www.SusanShelley.com. For more information about Ayn Rand, visit the Ayn Rand Institute (and buy out their bookstore) at www.AynRand.org.


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