“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.” – Ayn Rand writing in Atlas Shrugged.

The recession has edged our government closer to full-blown socialism: nationalizing banks and industries, increasing social welfare to record levels, firing company executives, leveraging the future of the country by printing money by the truckload. Blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with even more control that only deepens the crisis.

As I was swaying on the porch swing, observing a beautiful East Tennessee Spring evening, I thought, “Ayn Rand was right.” Then I thought …” you need to get a life.” Then I thought about Ayn Rand again.

Rand was an American author and her final novel, Atlas Shrugged, is about a fictional world that eerily resembles America today. I can’t stop thinking about how prescient she was.

In the book, the nation’s inventors and producers are taxed, abused, and forced to support a society of pasty money-grabbers increasingly dependent on a welfare state. The pandering politicians use laws and moral guilt to confiscate the businesses, inventions, art, scientific research, and ideas of its most brilliant leaders. Finally the “men of the mind” can’t take any more and go on strike. They hope to demonstrate that the economy and society will collapse without the profit motive and the efforts of the rational and productive.

And collapse it does.

As I thought about this book and its relevance today, I learned that I’m not the only one drawing comparisons.

Atlas Shrugged was written 51 years ago, but is selling faster than ever. This month, Amazon listed the book at its #1 sales position for the fiction and literature category! Rush Limbaugh frequently refers to the work and Congressman John Campbell (R-CA) said this year: “People are starting to feel like we’re … living in Atlas Shrugged.”

Two op-ed pieces referencing the book were featured in the New York Times just this year. One was written by Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.

“Why do we accept the budget-busting costs of a welfare state?” Brook wrote. “Because it implements the moral ideal of self-sacrifice to the needy. Why do so few protest the endless regulatory burdens placed on businessmen? Because businessmen are pursuing their self-interest, which we have been taught is dangerous and immoral. Why did the government go on a crusade to promote “affordable housing,” which meant forcing banks to make loans to unqualified home buyers? Because we believe people need to be homeowners, whether or not they can afford to pay for houses.

“The message is always the same: “Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good.” But Rand said this message is wrong — selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue. By this she did not mean exploiting others à la Bernie Madoff. Selfishness — that is, concern with one’s genuine, long-range interest — she wrote, required a man to think, to produce, and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily to mutual benefit.

“Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism — and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention — and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.”

Ayn Rand offered us an answer — independence and individual achievement enable society to survive and thrive, as long as there is a rational moral code. Over time, coerced self-sacrifice will cause society to self-destruct.

That is why she is relevant today.