Rising Fuel Costs Hit Air Travel, Consumers Hammered; Los Angeles Food Trucks Feeling Economic Pinch: Who's Next?

Vin Suprynowicz discussed the role of fuel prices in his review of "Atlas Shrugged." Gas was at $37.50 a gallon, so railroads became the most economical form of transportation. At those price passenger air travel would be 100 percent prohibitive. We're not there yet, but it's happening. See LAT, "Summer airfares may climb 15% from a year earlier":

As the summer travel season approaches, airline industry experts predict that soaring fuel prices and a sharp pickup in passenger demand will push airfares up 15% over a year earlier — to levels not seen since before the economic downturn.

Fare hikes have already begun, with six of the nation's largest airlines each raising rates at least five times since Jan. 1 for nearly all routes.

By the time the peak summer travel season rolls, travel industry experts predict, domestic airfares may reach an average of nearly $390, up from a low of $302 two years ago.

"We are definitely getting higher and higher and higher fares," said Tom Parsons, who runs the popular website BestFares.com. "They've been going up once or twice a month, a nickel here and a dime there."

And at the video, L.A.'s food truck business is getting hammered?

RELATED: From Pat Austin, "Is Atlas Shrugging Where You Are?"

Man's Rights

Well, with all the recent talk about "Atlas Shrugged," I've been skimming back over some of her writings. The novel is almost 1,100 pages, and I have no plans to re-read it (although I'm considering The Fountainhead for another round). I have been reading some of Rand's essays, for example, "Man's Rights", which is featured in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness. A sample:

The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.

All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary coexistence of individuals. All previous systems had held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favor, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that man’s life is his by right (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self- sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action-which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

More at the link.

Atlas is Shrugging in California

I probably should have avoided the movie reviews before seeing the new film version of Ayn Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. Rand's relentless affirmation of the individual against the state would be censored if today's socialist saboteurs of the economy had their way. And thus the reactions among the progressives --- while not unexpected --- were simply visceral in their condemnation. Of course the eternally angry Roger Ebert panned the film, but a bevy of other reviewers were only slightly less disgusted. Roy Edroso's piece is actually quite hilarious, but I doubt the diarists at Daily Kos have even read the book: If it's about the supreme morality of individualism and markets, then scoffs and guffaws attacking "greed" is about as sophisticated a response as you'll get. And other reviewers are just piling on by now, for example at Creative Loafing Atlanta, "Atlas Shrugged. Critics Deplored. Ideologues Flocked":

... it's a monumental piece of crap.

Left-wing propaganda? Perhaps. But when The Atlantic's Megan McArdle threw in the towel, herself a connoisseur of the free market, that sure seemed like a little much.

But just in the nick of time comes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, with a fabulous review, where he notes:

The best word to describe Atlas Shrugged Part 1 is … surprising. It’s surprisingly well-paced, surprisingly intelligent, surprisingly well-acted, and surprisingly entertaining. Perhaps most surprising of all, it has me thinking about re-reading the novel again. I would highly recommend it to friends and their families.

And he adds in an update:

I deliberately avoided reading reviews of the film until after I saw it first...

I'm not that disciplined, alas, but RTWT. And see also the outstanding piece by Vin Suprynowicz at the Las Vegas Review Journal. I'd quote it, but considering the Review Journal's a Righthaven partner, folks can just read it at the link.

I have to admit being a little disappointed in the film, a disappointment only partially influenced the left's anti-Randian diatribes. I just felt that it needed to be bigger somehow, bigger in reaching to the majesty of the novel. I know I'm idealistic. Atlas Shrugged is larger than life, especially life in these United States where to celebrate achievement and self-interest is to be attacked as a class warrior. (I know, it should be the other way around, but I just last week had debates with people who attacked conservatives as fomenting class warfare, strangely enough.) That said, I did like the movie. I liked it a lot. I think Taylor Schilling plays a perfect Dagny Taggart. Not too different from how I envisioned her. And the sleek cinematography was perfectly riveting. I know this is Part I of a trilogy, but the movie was short and I wanted more. I wish I could just go back out to see Part II this afternoon.

One thing I worried about was how well the filmmakers would be able to place the setting in present times, 2016, amid a crisis of severe economic dislocation (like we're having under the Obamacrats in D.C. and across the nation). After seeing the opening scenes, and thinking about it a bit more, the scenario of disappearing industrialists seems entirely accurate. Indeed, as I've been reporting here of late, in California we've got the same kind of wrecked economy that Ayn Rand inveighed against. The Los Angeles Times was touting the expansion of the tech sector in February --- 100,000 new jobs were created --- while burying the lede on lingering massive unemployment in the state. But then the March job numbers --- unemployment edged back up to 12.1 percent --- forced the paper to be more honest. And then this weekend the Orange County Register published a devastating piece on the exodus of 69 businesses from the state for the first quarter of 2011. Reading the top ten list of reasons for businesses bailing is a jaw-dropping experience, but one that I'm getting used to. Between Sacramento and Washington, California can't get a break. Indeed, state officials have taken a fact-finding trip to Texas in hopes of stemming the flow of jobs to the Longhorn State and elsewhere.

Let's hope it gets better. For the past two years, the old Sunset Ford dealership in Westminster has been vacant, a symbol of the depression-like marketplace that hammered key sections of the local economy. For more than 40 years Sunset Ford did business at the intersection of the 22 and 405 Freeways, and so it was a shock to see that enterprise close its doors in 2009. And despite the Obama administration's economic stimulus, the location remains idle, like a ghost town:

Here's the old Sunset Ford sign, in disuse with no indication of replacement, down the way along Garden Grove Boulevard next to the 22 Freeway. It's a constant reminder of a collapsed marketplace:

As I was returning home, I saw this fellow with his homeless sign at the Jamboree offramp at Interstate 5. Notice the sign asks not for handouts, but for help finding ANY work.

This was a couple of weeks ago, and later that afternoon I went shopping at the District in Tustin. Borders is closing its location there, one of the 200 stores nationwide going belly up:

They were unloading everything:

But copies of David Remnick's recent book on the Radical-in-Chief weren't moving so well, and that's at 60 percent off:

And elsewhere around the mall stores have had trouble staying open , so it's not just Borders over here:

And checking over at Jamboree and Main Street in Irvine, this copying business, MyPrint, consolidated with an equity firm and closed this location. The local printing market is pretty messed up:

A lot of commercial real estate available throughout the Irvine business district.

I'm not sure what this was, probably a restaurant. This is down by Lake Forest, off the 5 Freeway:

I haven't had a chance to update with more pictures over the last couple of weeks, and not for lack of material. That said, there's indeed some robust sectors of the economy, especially entertainment and high tech. But overall California's economy is stagnating, and it's not going to improve as long as Democrat-socialists continue to sabotage the business climate with high taxes to fund out-of-control spending.

Sounds like something out of a movie, or something.

Los Angeles Times Disses 'Atlas Shrugged'

Well, I can't say one way or the other until I see it. And I won't see it until tomorrow, since it's playing in L.A., and I'll be doing tea party coverage today. So take LAT's review FWIW from a leftist outlet, "Movie review: 'Atlas Shrugged': Ayn Rand's opus of unfettered capitalism gets a flat screen treatment."

Meanwhile, you know Roger Ebert's gonna hate it, but read it just for the glimpse into the anti-individualist worldview:

So OK. Let’s say you know the novel, you agree with Ayn Rand, you’re an objectivist or a libertarian, and you’ve been waiting eagerly for this movie. Man, are you going to get a letdown. It’s not enough that a movie agree with you, in however an incoherent and murky fashion. It would help if it were like, you know, entertaining?

(Via Memeorandum.) And others aren't holding off until they see it to weigh in negatively. That said, Kurt Loder did see it and was unimpressed --- and he's writing at Reason.

More later ...

Kurt Loder Reviews 'Atlas Shrugged' at Reason

See "Where is John Galt?":

Anyone not familiar with Rand’s novel will likely be baffled by the goings-on here. Characters spend much time hunkered around tables and desks nattering about rail transport, copper-mining, and the oil business. A few of these people are stiffly virtuous (“I’m simply cultivating a society that values individual achievement”), but most are contemptible (“We must act to benefit society”…“a committee has decided”…“We rely on public funding.”) These latter creeps should set our blood boiling, but they’re so cartoonishly one-dimensional that any prospective interest soon slumps. We are initially intrigued by the recurring question, “Who is John Galt?” But since the movie covers only the first third of the novel (a crippling miscalculation), we never really find out, apart from noticing an anonymous figure lurking around the edges of the action, togged out in a trench coat and a rain-soaked fedora like a film-noir flatfoot who’s wandered into an epoch far away from his own.

She's Hot. She's Sexy ... Ayn Rand's Bigger Than Ever

From Matt Welch at Hit and Run, "How Ayn Rand 'was loathed by the mainstream conservative movement'."

Following the links takes to Donald Luskin's piece at WSJ, "Remembering the Real Ayn Rand: The author of "Atlas Shrugged" was an individualist, not a conservative, and she knew big business was as much a threat to capitalism as government bureaucrats."

Welch notes that Luskin's got a new book coming out, "I Am John Galt: Today's Heroic Innovators Building the World and the Villainous Parasites Destroying It." And he also points us to Reason's 2009 cover story, "She’s Back! Ayn Rand is bigger than ever. But are her new fans radical enough for capitalism?" It's a little dated (nobody's "going Galt," for example), although there's an important message there, revived again this week by President Obama's speech on the budget:

For Rand’s popularity to achieve political traction, Randism will have to move beyond the strange preoccupation of a few politicians and the full-time passion of two specialist think tanks. Her ideas will need to become the guiding principle for a significant voting bloc or politically active movement. And that is a difficult problem for Objectivism, which as an organized movement never managed to convert the millions of cash-paying Rand customers into active “radicals for capitalism,” to use the author’s own self-description.

I love the celebration of the individual, but I'm no atheist and some of Rand's individualist abandon leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But Rep. Paul Ryan is cited at the piece. Ryan's Catholic, so he's not going in whole hog for Rand's vision in the moral sphere. But he does endorse the emphasis on liberty in the market (narrowly defined), and the threat from the bureaucratic Leviathan that's more real than ever under the current Democrat regime. I think these points indicate an adaptable Randism for people who aren't that radical. Frankly, it's pretty rad just to go Rand on economic individualism, so folks can sort out Objectivist ethics in others moral realms after that point.

FreedomWorks: 'Atlas Is Shrugging'

Via Daily Caller, "For FreedomWorks, Atlas is Already Shrugging":

RELATED: From Donald Luskin, at Wall Street Journal, "Remembering the Real Ayn Rand."

'Atlas Shrugged': New Film Takes Sorta Randian Road to Big Screen

I'm surprised.

A decent and fair report on the front page of today's Los Angeles Times, "'Atlas Shrugged' finally comes to the screen, albeit in chunks."

It has taken businessman John Aglialoro nearly 20 years to realize his ambition of making a movie out of "Atlas Shrugged," the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand that has sold more than 7 million copies and has as passionate a following among many political conservatives and libertarians as "Twilight" has among teen girls.

But the version of the book coming to theaters Friday is decidedly independent, low-cost and even makeshift. Shot for a modest $10 million by a first-time director with a cast of little-known actors, "Atlas Shrugged: Part I," the first in an expected trilogy, will play on about 300 screens in 80 markets. It's being marketed with the help of conservative media and "tea party" organizing groups and put into theaters by a small, Salt Lake City-based booking service.

The fact that one of the 20th century's most influential books is coming to movie screens in such a fashion is — depending on whom you ask — a reflection of liberal Hollywood's aversion to Rand's ideas, a symptom of Aglialoro's rigid adherence to them, or a testament to the challenges inherent in adapting the complex tome.

Aglialoro ultimately made a movie that hews more to Rand's ideology than the conventions of cinematic storytelling, at the risk that far fewer people will see it. Taking a page from the independent blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ," however, he is paying for his own theater bookings and marketing his film to an audience Hollywood often overlooks.

Keep reading at the link. The piece notes that the producers "showed footage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington..." Also mentioned there is Freedomworks, where bloggers at the CPAC blog-bash saw a preview screening of the film's trailers.

The movie comes out next Friday, April 15th. There's a couple of local tea parties that day, so I might see it on Saturday --- and then I'll update with my own review.

Atlas Shrugged

Freedom Works showed a couple of clips from Atlas Shrugged, Part I, at the "Blog Bash" last Thursday. The movie's website is here. Some will say a film can't do justice to an epic of this scale, but considering that War and Peace is probably faster reading, perhaps a movie version will be a welcomed diversion. Besides, the cinematography looks fabulous:

Blogging Aliteracy

My good friend David Swindle is having a fairly heated exchange with Lisa Graas, a prolific Catholic blogger and contributor at NewsReal Blog. Lisa's Twitter page is here.

The background, with links, is at David's post, "Do Not Blog About Something If You Haven’t Adequately Studied It. Why is This a Hard Concept?" Lisa has been hammering Ayn Rand's theory of objectivism, although she's never read Ayn Rand. To which David tweets:

Sorry Lisa but I can't respect your analysis of Objectivism until you read more of Ayn Rand's books.

Lisa says she's able to form an intelligent opinion based on Ayn Rand's Wikipedia entries and her television interviews, including this one with Mike Wallace:

Lisa's response at her own blog is here: "Dave Swindle Accused Me of Fervent Anti-Intellectualism?"

I'm not invested in this debate personally, although the topic is fascinating. I'd argue that Lisa is certainly and rightfully able to opine on the moral validity of Ayn Rand's theories. The problem is that the program at the David Horowitz Freedom Center is essentially a scholarly one. The debates are about books. And it's kind of inappropriate to be a representative of that problematique while being out and proud about not having read books you intend to criticize. Thus, I'd have to agree with David's point on anti-intellectualism, although all of this reminds me of an article at the Washington Post almost ten years ago: "The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep: More and More Americans Who Can Read Are Choosing Not To. Can We Afford to Write Them Off?" As a professor, my job is to get folks to read more, much more. But I was especially interested in this discussion at the Washington Post, since I'd just recently finished my Ph.D and started my academic career:

Jeremy Spreitzer probably wouldn't read this story if it weren't about him.

He is an aliterate -- someone who can read, but chooses not to.

A graduate student in public affairs at Park University in Kansas City, Mo., Spreitzer, 25, gleans most of his news from TV. He skims required texts, draws themes from dust jackets and, when he absolutely, positively has to read something, reaches for the audiobook.

"I am fairly lazy when it comes to certain tasks," says Spreitzer, a long-distance runner who hopes to compete in the 2004 Olympics. "Reading is one of them."

As he grows older, Spreitzer finds he has less time to read. And less inclination. In fact, he says, if he weren't in school, he probably wouldn't read at all.

He's not alone. According to the survey firm NDP Group -- which tracked the everyday habits of thousands of people through the 1990s -- this country is reading printed versions of books, magazines and newspapers less and less. In 1991, more than half of all Americans read a half-hour or more every day. By 1999, that had dropped to 45 percent.

A 1999 Gallup Poll found that only 7 percent of Americans were voracious readers, reading more than a book a week, while some 59 percent said they had read fewer than 10 books in the previous year. Though book clubs seem popular now, only 6 percent of those who read belong to one. The number of people who don't read at all, the poll concluded, has been rising for the past 20 years.

The reports on changes in reading cut to the quick of American culture. We pride ourselves on being a largely literate First World country while at the same time we rush to build a visually powerful environment in which reading is not required.

The results are inevitable. Aliteracy is all around. Just ask:

• Internet developers. At the Terra Lycos portal design lab in Waltham, Mass., researcher William Albert has noticed that the human guinea pigs in his focus groups are too impatient to read much. When people look up information on the Internet today, Albert explains, they are "basically scanning. There's very little actual comprehension that's going on." People, Albert adds, prefer to get info in short bursts, with bullets, rather than in large blocks of text.

• Transportation gurus. Chandra Clayton, who oversees the design of road signs and signals for the Virginia Department of Transportation, says, "Symbols can quickly give you a message that might take too long to read in text." The department is using logos and symbols more and more. When it comes to highway safety and getting lifesaving information quickly, she adds, "a picture is worth a thousand words."

• Packaging designers. "People don't take the time to read anything," explains Jim Peters, editor of BrandPackaging magazine. "Marketers and packagers are giving them colors and shapes as ways of communicating." For effective marketing, Peters says, "researchers tell us that the hierarchy is colors, shapes, icons and, dead last, words."

Some of this shift away from words -- and toward images -- can be attributed to our ever-growing multilingual population. But for many people, reading is passe or impractical or, like, so totally unnecessary in this day and age.

To Jim Trelease, author of "The Read-Aloud Handbook," this trend away from the written word is more than worrisome. It's wicked. It's tearing apart our culture. People who have stopped reading, he says, "base their future decisions on what they used to know.

More at the link. (And food for thought, in any case, especially for armchair intellectuals who don't read the books they're claiming to criticize.)

Atlas Shrugged, Behind the Scenes

Via Instapundit:

Grant Bowler is new to me, since I'm not a "Lost" fan, or whatever. And that's better. I'd hate to have Brad Pitt star (for example) and then while watching the movie have flashbacks to "Fight Club" or "Seven." Basically, it makes for a clean slate with a fresh star.

RELATED: "Cameras Roll on 'Atlas'."

Interview With Jennifer Burns

Via Ed Driscoll:

And at Amazon, Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.

Ayn Rand and the Tea Parties

From Adam Kirsch's book review at the New York Times, "Ayn Rand’s Revenge" (via Memeorandum):

A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt. In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”

“Atlas Shrugged” was published 52 years ago, but in the Obama era, Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before. Sales of the book have reportedly spiked. At “tea parties” and other conservative protests, alongside the Obama-as-Joker signs, you will find placards reading “Atlas Shrugs” and “Ayn Rand Was Right.” Not long after the inauguration, as right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck were invoking Rand and issuing warnings of incipient socialism, Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, told a reporter that the prospect of rising taxes and government regulation meant “people are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ ”

Actually, Ayn Rand's influence on the tea parties wasn't all that strong over the summer, outward influence at least. (As measued by the popularity of Ayn Rand paraphernalia at the tea parties and town halls.) Of course, Rand's philosophy has been prophetic this year, and current interest in objectivism is record-breaking (which explains why some neo-communists are strangely trying to expropiate her work). And some argue we're living the state-socialist wrecking ball. See, "We Are Living in an Ayn Rand Novel." Leftists can spin all they want. Atlas Shrugged is not a slip cover for what's happening today, but its accuracy in so many other ways in mind-boggling.

Image Credit: From the Orange County Tax Day Tea Party, April 15, 2009.

Living an Ayn Rand Novel

From Veronique de Rugy "We Are Living in an Ayn Rand Novel":

A year or two ago, only the most radical leftists would have dreamed that we’d be living in a country where the government owns a majority share in GM, bailed out private insurers, took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and handed over billions of dollars to the financial sector ....

But as I am listening to the hearing on executive compensation and TARP special master (how crippy is this title?), I realize we are now officially living in a world that resembles an Ayn Rand novel.

Read the whole thing at the link.

Hat Tip: Glenn Reynolds. (Video: Reason.tv, "Radicals for Capitalism: Celebrating the Enduring Legacy of Ayn Rand.")