The Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged depicts a ghastly world in which more and more US government regulation aimed at protecting corrupt special interests drags down creative people who eventually go on strike themselves.

They thereby crash the system, which has (it turns out) relied on their passive acceptance of their own oppression: the ‘sanction of the victim’.

The long-awaited movie has sunk without trace. So what? Buy the book anyway if you haven’t read it:

While you’re waiting for it to arrive, look at this excellent WSJ article about the problems facing Boeing in the USA.

Boeing wants to move production of a new aircraft to South Carolina where the laws are less favourable to unions. But the National Labor Relations Board, an Ayn Rand euphemism if ever there was one, is trying to stop this happening to protect unionised jobs in Seattle.

It’s a measure of how serious the problems of the USA now are that it is apparently easier to move businesses from one EU state to another than from one US state to another.

Think about the morality of this one. If the NLRB has its way, Boeing in effect becomes the state-sponsored slave of the Boeing workers in Seattle.

The workers there are free to walk away from Boeing if they are unhappy. But Boeing is not free to walk away from them.

Unbelievable. Yet it’s happening.

And many workers are walking, but away from their own unions to states where corporations can get on with employing people – one a minute:.

For years, unions argued that right-to-work laws were bad for workers and for the states that passed them. But with the NLRB complaint, they’ve essentially thrown in the towel.

If forced unionism is better for the economy of a state, why would the NLRB need to intervene to keep Boeing from leaving Washington? Why aren’t businesses and workers moving operations to heavily unionized places like Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania and fleeing states like Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and Texas?

In reality, the stampede of businesses from forced-union states like Washington has accelerated in recent years. A 2010 study in the Cato Journal by economist Richard Vedder of Ohio University found that between 2000 and 2008 4.8 million Americans moved from forced-union states to right-to-work states. That’s one person every minute of every day.

I ran the numbers through a calculator. He’s right.

Atlas Shrugged ends with this mighty passage: 

“The road is cleared,” said Galt. “We are going back to the world.”

He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.”

Hmm. Would John Galt be proud to do that these days?