The reason that Obama seems like a character from Atlas Shrugged is that he is a character from Atlas Shrugged.

Via Glen Reynolds:

MORE PROOF THAT FOR BARACK OBAMA, Atlas Shrugged isn’t a cautionary tale, it’s a how-to manual.

“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”

“Who?”

“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”

She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”

Ouch.

Who is John Galt?



This may be a timely movie, but "Atlas Shrugged" was a long and very silly book.  The characters are deliberately written in no more than one dimension so that there would be no confusion about who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.  Rand's obsession in this regard took her to the extent of giving the good guys nice names and the bad guys ugly names. The last 100 or so pages of the 3,000 or so pages consists of a long, long speech by the mysterious John Galt that lays out every jot and tittle of Rand's political/social/sexual/monetary/crazy-whacko narcissism-as-greatest-good theories.

Nonetheless, if you like that kind of thing, then that's the kind of thing that will get you blood boiling and your imagination fired with ideas of "going John Galt" and moving to Patagonia with your fellow "movers of the world" as part of an intellectual boycott of the parasites.

The trailer looks good.