Simon Heffer takes a polemical pot-shot at David Cameron, accusing him of succumbing to socialism in his recent Davos speech:

… one of the most shallow speeches by a supposedly serious politician that I have ever read. It should also terrify anyone who might feel he or she should vote Conservative at the next election, because it promises that what we should get would in most respects be little better than what we have.

This caught my beady eye:

Given his lack of intellectualism, Mr Cameron may not have read Atlas Shrugged, the epic novel by the American philosopher Ayn Rand in which a man discovers the secret of perpetual motion and becomes excessively rich by putting many of his less intelligent competitors out of business.

The newly poor – poor because they failed to give the public what they wanted at a price they were prepared to pay – demand a Fair Shares Law, whereby they are compensated for their lack of brains and risk-taking by the enterprises who do make money.

Alas Simon Heffer appears not to have read Atlas Shrugged either. The whole point of the book is that the inventor of the ‘perpetual motion’ machine (John Galt) never builds it. He goes on strike, setting an example of refusing to let the armies of official and unofficial moochers and looters live off the work of skilled inventors while sneering at those inventors’ diligence and genius.

Other top-end clever people people join him. The technical underpinning of society breaks down. Blind collectivists in government first bring everything they can under state control. That fails. They finally capture John Galt and try to force him to think for them – to enslave his mind after enslaving his body…

Thus Atlas shrugs – he decides not to hold up the world any more. And the world duly stops

The Heffer view tries to get at this, but perhaps is a bit overstated even for my radical taste:

… those who take the risks and have the superior judgment should have the rewards: anything else is communism.

One main problem with Atlas Shrugged is that the brilliant industrialists are all portrayed as mainly moral if not noble people. In real life there are non-trivial issues about how best one might deal with people who get great wealth (either morally or immorally) but then use that power to try to stack the deck to cling on to their gains or reward their friends. See eg US and UK bail-outs and the Obama so-called stimulus plan.

The Comments on Simon’s piece feature the usual Internet mish-mash of wild nihilist ranting and thoughtful nuance. This one by Matt Wood maybe gets to the heart of the issue:

Mr Heffer appears to be making the assumption that morality only derives from ‘freedom’. I would suggest to him that there are other values we should consider moral such as family, environment, nation and tradition.

Quite right.

But surely they too are underpinned by a vision of freedom? Otherwise what are they? Who defines them and how they are to be pursued? Are they something synthetic or forced or otherwise ‘managed’? And if so by whom? What is the moral basis for that?

This is the Point of Atlas Shrugged.

That unless you base your society firmly on individual freedom and individual responsibility, the imposing edifices of society must ultimately rely on force and (worse) greedy ignorance.

Normally we do not have to think about such matters. But when something tall and impressive starts to wobble, a good place to look if you want to deal with the problem properly is the foundations?