|Peter Boettke|

That is the topic of John Stossel's column this week. And it is a great question to ask at this historical moment. My top candidate is Rahm Emanuel. Though perhaps he would be better as Ellsworth Toohey from The Fountainhead.

Last term I taught a class which compared and contrasted the economic narrative in Dickens's Hard Times; Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; and Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I recommend this exercise to anyone teaching a freshman honors course, or an interdisciplinary seminar to college students. It is not an exercise in political propaganda, but an invitation to inquiry through literature. As I tell the students on the first day of the class, we are going to engage in a dialogue about 'facts' and 'truth' and then I explain the different mediums --- when it comes to journalism we expect 'facts' but not necessarily 'truth'; from novelists we expect 'truth' but not 'facts'; but from scholars we expect both 'facts' and 'truth'.

These three novels allow you to discuss the industrial revolution and the process of economic development, the Great Depression and the problems of inflation and unemployment, and the grand debate between the free market economy versus socialist planning and government ownership. Along the way, we are led on a tour of the history of economic ideas from Adam Smith to F. A. Hayek, and the history of economic policy from 18th and 19th century England to 20th century US and USSR.

This past term in re-reading Atlas Shrugged, I was impressed again with the way Rand was able to pack so much basic economic reasoning into her story without losing the novel. Lesser writers who attempt to blend works of fiction with detailed discussions of ideas from non-fiction often lose the story-line in the process. It takes considerable skill to weave the two in a narrative. Rand perhaps for the literary critic uses the tool of the 'speech' too much to accomplish this, but in the context of the times that her novel is set in, imagining such an episode is not that much of a stretch. Anyway, my favorite chapter on this re-reading is the Aristocracy of Pull.

Anyway, tonight (Thursday) at 8:00pm, John Stossel will discuss Atlas Shrugged and its relevance to understanding today's policy debates and our lived economic reality. Tune in, the National Championship game will still be on and in all probability will not be interesting until the second half anyway.