I like nearly everybody else, at least everybody of a certain age, wish that the hands of time could be turned back to the 1950s, when the Big Three were strong, and with their earnings could afford generous pay and benefits to workers, which influenced other labor contracts and compensation levels across the economy, thus giving rise to unprecedented prosperity, especially for blue-collar union workers — the same people who bought all those Chevys and Pontiacs, the same people who by the millions bought their little slice of heaven in the Levittowns and similar suburban developments of the era. But that was then, and this is now. It's a whole new, global world.

I have compassion, or, in the parlance of the day, I have 'empathy' with the concessions UAW workers have been making for a number of years, as well as for the more serious hits they are now taking, especially in the decline of their numbers still on the job. But I have equal, in fact greater empathy, indeed sympathy, for the stockholders who essentially have been wiped out, for the bondholders who are being forced to take pennies on the dollar, for the dealers who are getting screwed, and for the taxpayers who, without any say-so by them, are being forced to support enterprises which, as the author suggested, quite likely are beyond salvation and which in fact may not be “too big to fail.”

The protection of the UAW species goes against the laws of the economic jungle, while at the same time it is of course entirely consistent with the buy-votes-at-any-cost dementia of our corrupt and know-nothing political class. Those laws cannot be long ignored or abridged before the economic structure itself starts to fail, as is clearly starting to happen already.

At age 16 I read Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' and it profoundly shaped my thinking. Now, at age 61, and with the book's recent resurgence of popularity, I thought it time to give it another read. I'm still less than a hundred pages into its thousand-page length, but already it's coming back to me why I found the book so enthralling the first time around. The message is what America was founded on and for two hundred years was all about: Let me be, let me be free, let me make of my life what I can, without intrusions and machinations of duplicitous bureaucrats sitting on a hill rather than being down in the trenches; and this: if you're able-bodied and able-minded, and if you are not prepared to work, and hard, well then to hell with you.

Rumor has it there is a serious effort underway to make a movie of the book; rumor has it that for decades the idea has been kicked around. I can well understand the challenges. Even so, I hope that this time the project comes to fruition. Never, ever in our country's history has the message been more needed.