KEN LAY SHRUGGED:

Scandals lead execs to 'Atlas Shrugged' (Del Jones, 09/24/2002, USA TODAY)

After Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and other scandals that have created a public backlash against industry and its captains, the Kansas City group has fantasized of a modern-day strike of thinkers and creators, says Neal Patterson, a group member and CEO of Cerner, a big health care information technology company.

"We are the producers of society," says Will Koch, CEO of a development company that owns the Holiday World & Splashin' Safari theme park in Santa Claus, Ind. "We take resources that would be idle and put people to work."

Atlas Shrugged fans note that they despise illegal behavior. Fighting crime, foreign invasion and protecting property rights are the legitimate functions of government, and they welcome jail terms for white-collar criminals, says Ed Snider, chairman of the Philadelphia sports teams Flyers and 76ers and an Atlas Shrugged devotee. Indeed, Rand wrote, "Neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud."

But instead of punishing the guilty, Rand-fan executives say, recent scandals have unleashed an executive witch hunt.

An astonishing number of web denizens are Ayn Rand fans, including Steven Martinovich, who sent this. Indeed, one suspects that nearly every educated young white male in America has a Randian phase and I've no deep quarrel with her philosophy in general. But her writings do have an unfortunate tone, captured a little bit here, of the industrialist as somehow a superior being, as if taking risks with capital somehow converted them into geniuses. Even if it violates her theories, it's easy to see how those who believe themselves to be such geniuses, so far above their fellow men, wopuld come to feel that they are not bound by the rules that restrain we mere mortals. This worship of the technocrat is what is most off-putting about her work. It also sets up a disturbing tension in her novels between the general celebration of freedom and the particular celebration of the genius of an elite few. It's not fatal but it is hard to reconcile. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 24, 2002 9:26 PM