One of the first things you notice when you go looking for \u201cmainstream\u201d reviews of the film \u201cAtlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt?\u201d is how few there are.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, most of the mouth-flappers of our mainstream media — being diehard fans of (and apologists for) our current, all-corrupting, welfare-warfare-taxation state — hate Rand, Objectivism, Libertarianism, the Free Market, and anything else in the top corner of your handy Nolan Chart. They hate these things with a passion which can belong only to those who can\u2019t actually disprove any of the free marketers\u2019 dystopian predictions for their failed regulatory police state, which are systematically coming true before our eyes. (\u201cIt failed in Russia! It failed in Cuba and Cambodia! And it\u2019s soon to fail again, in a national capital near you!\u201d)<\/p>\n
In fact, it would appear the hope that \u201cJohn Galt\u201d might sink like a stone without trace actually outweighed the modest personal gratification these critics might have gotten by individually shredding its low-budget lack of slam-bang action and its \u201cmean-spirited\u201d theme.<\/p>\n
One of them, however, did break ranks and weigh in last week with a very curious criticism of a scene that occurs near the beginning of the film, as Dagny Taggart suffers a sprained ankle after literally crashing her way into Galt\u2019s Gulch.<\/p>\n
The Dagny character (Laura Regan, in this outing) is examined by a physician, using a hand-held scanning device of his own invention that appears to operate like a miniature fluoroscope. The physician is played by a fine character actor named Steven Tobolowsky. Dagny recognizes him as someone who had been a famous neurosurgeon “on the outside.\u201d He smilingly says he now practices \u201ca different kind of medicine\u201d here.<\/p>\n
(You may have noticed I\u2019ve avoided Tobolowsky\u2019s character name. That\u2019s because he\u2019s actually playing a character named by Rand\u2019s book Dr. Thomas Hendricks, a brain surgeon who gave it all up to join the strike, though the film\u2019s official credits all seem to list him as playing Dr. Hugh Akston, who was in fact a Ph.D. of Philosophy, not a physician. Beats me . . . though they did reportedly film this thing in 18 days.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, the Tobolowsky character states \u201cEvery physician should have one of these.\u201d Our trusty statist reviewer seems to have interpreted this to mean Tobolowsky\u2019s character was somehow greedily withholding this invention from those in the \u201coutside world\u201d because they wouldn\u2019t pay him enough, just as Galt is withholding his source of cheap electric power. (When all this time we thought it was the Greedy Oil Companies!)<\/p>\n
So . . . a millionaire brain surgeon is willing to give up all that wealth and prestige in order to be a GP in a little mountain village -\u2013 accepting a vast reduction in standard of living -\u2013 but the meaning of this scene is that he\u2019s \u201ctoo greedy\u201d to share his invention? Might it not be a tad more reasonable to assume the point is that in today\u2019s heavily regulated (in fact, government controlled) medical field, no single individual could hope<\/em> to win \u201cFDA approval\u201d of such a device in a time period measured in less than decades or for a cost measured in less than millions, even though a single inventor, working in some mountain village, has here managed to get one up and running in only a matter of months, and is obviously willing to employ it without demanding any vast fee?<\/p>\n Look at all the iconic breakthrough firearms invented by John Moses Browning, working at his private workbench in Utah, back before 1920. Today, any single individual seeking to invent and manufacture the Browning Automatic Rifle would be jailed, if he didn\u2019t die in a hail of ATF gunfire in the initial government raid. (What’s that? “All you need is a license”? Write in and apply for one, then, informing the ATF that in keeping with the 2nd and 14th Amendments you plan to sell your new machine gun to any “civilian” who can come up with the cash, just as John Browning did. Let me know how you do.) And it follows as the night from day that the pace of medical innovation in America will also now slow, under the regulation and rationing imposed by ObamaMedicare.<\/p>\n I believe Tobolowsky even tells Dagny \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what you can accomplish without red tape.\u201d<\/p>\n If the statists wants to argue devices like the hypothetical Galt\u2019s Gulch scanner shouldn’t<\/em> be made available until one of several corrupted medical corporations, paying off their FDA regulators by offering them all highly-paid \u201crevolving door\u201d jobs, spends 20 years and millions of dollars on \u201cregulatory approvals,\u201d because \u201cAfter all, it might have some dangerous unforeseen side effect,\u201d go ahead and make that case.<\/p>\n But Tobolowsky\u2019s character is withholding his invention because he\u2019s \u201cgreedy\u201d?<\/p>\n As a matter of fact, as others have pointed out, Ayn Rand now suffers a version of that fate which awaits anyone whose predictions are too good. Point out that some clever science fiction writer (Gernsback? Van Vogt?) predicted cell phones, robots, television, or atomic weapons in the 1920s or ’30s or early ’40s, and Today\u2019s Youth gives you a blank stare. Haven\u2019t we always had that stuff?<\/p>\n When Rand predicted in her 1957 masterpiece that even physicians might someday join her \u201cstrike of the productive class\u201d -\u2013 millionaire neurosurgeons preferring to accept a much reduced standard of living rather than put up with a government regulatory takeover of the entire field of medicine — critics jeered that this was far-fetched nonsense. But today, a \u201cgovernment takeover of medicine\u201d is so close to being a fait accompli<\/em> that Rand gets little credit for having shown any great powers of foresight and extrapolation here -\u2013 the average younger viewer apparently just dismissing this as \u201cThe same right-wing \u2018Tea Party\u2019 whining we\u2019ve been hearing for years — these greedy right-wingers just want all the poor people to get sick and die.\u201d<\/p>\n Yeah, and those who wanted to close the wait-in-line-for-hours Communist food dispensaries in Moscow “wanted all the Russians to starve.” So why didn\u2019t any of the Russians starve?<\/p>\n This is not all just \u201ctheoretical.\u201d I happen to know a few physicians who are either recently retired or in the process of retiring, years earlier than might otherwise have been expected. Why? They tell me \u201cMedicine is no fun anymore.\u201d Why? For the most part these guys aren\u2019t doctrinaire Objectivists, or Libertarians, or political animals of any stripe. They tend to draw few distinctions between Medicare and private insurers and the new regulatory purveyors of Obamacare. They still enjoy diagnosing and healing. They just noticed that every year they were spending less time and money on practicing medicine, and more on a growing office staff that spends its days on the telephone or on their computer monitors, seeking \u201cpermission\u201d from some far-away, anonymous bean-counter (who DOESN\u2019T have a medical degree) before the doctor is allowed to proceed with each (progressively more curtailed) step of testing, diagnosis, and treatment.<\/p>\n These medicos are not writing long-winded political diatribes to their local newspapers. They\u2019re just throwing up their hands, folding their tents, telling the spouse \u201cHoney, we\u2019ve got enough money, this is no fun anymore and it\u2019s getting worse, let\u2019s retire and enjoy life for however many years we\u2019ve got left.\u201d<\/p>\n They may not all be moving to the same mountain valley in Colorado. But they are<\/em> going on strike. We are losing their services, and the bright kids who should have succeeded them are wisely going into management or Big Pharma.<\/p>\n I believe I can even tell you how it\u2019ll end up. Washington will promise everyone the same quality of medicine, all essentially for free, and that\u2019s what they\u2019ll deliver: Soviet-style medicine, with really long lines and increasing mortality rates (which they\u2019ll fudge to look better), for the \u201cbottom 93 percent\u201d of us.<\/p>\n For the 7 percent who can pay cash? The best quality medical treatment will now be available in sparkling modern clinics operated by the best and the brightest American-trained doctors . . . just not in the U.S.A.<\/p>\n Where was it the leaders of the Soviet Union used to go for their<\/em> medical treatment? I don\u2019t think it was Leningrad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the first things you notice when you go looking for \u201cmainstream\u201d reviews of the film \u201cAtlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt?\u201d is how few there are. Needless to say, most of the mouth-flappers of our mainstream media — being diehard fans of (and apologists for) our current, all-corrupting, welfare-warfare-taxation state — hate Rand, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,18,22,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-economics","category-media","category-movie-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-wE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2024"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2034,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions\/2034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}