BOOKS OF MY LIFE: Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was a slog, but thanks to Bob, I dunnit.

The irony is so delicious I might just dine on it for weeks, because all those looters, parasites and second-raters populating Ayn Rand's barely readable Atlas Shrugged turn out to be precisely the same ones citing her novel today as their primary formative influence as they busily calculate the price of human life compared to the bare necessities of accumulating capital and enhancing profits amid our cancerous late-stage capitalism.

COVID-19 shortly will become their own personalized Taggart Tunnel. I don't want anyone to die, but these real-life moochers need to go far, far away where they can live happily ever after making mad, passionate love to their fattened wallets.

John Galt, my pasty white ass.

However, perhaps even bizarrely, I've read Atlas Shrugged. It's actually one of the most influential 32 books of my life (a list that needs updating this summer). How I came to read Atlas Shrugged is a story worth retelling, though only briefly.

Rest assured that I didn't choose the novel for leisurely beach reading, or because of a fondness for its mentally unbalanced author, her bizarre message or the self-indulgent cult politics it spawned: Woman meets married man and falls for the steel he invented, and they don't live happily ever because her real spirit animal is another guy who is stopping the engine of the world to lead a rich dude's revolution so that millions will starve, and in the process, somehow prove his point.

No, the reason I read Atlas Shrugged is that the late, great Bob Youngblood, my literature teacher as a senior in high school, commanded me to read it in two weeks flat or risk failing his course, this edict coming after I'd devoured the class assignment (Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations) in a single weekend, then openly taunted Bob on Monday about it not being sufficiently challenging.

"Fine, you little shit": I was kept after class to be informed that if I was so incredibly bright and advanced -- if I wasn't willing to help my classmates understand Dickens -- a book like Atlas Shrugged should be the ideal, advanced challenge I so evidently craved.

Scoffing, I agreed ... and got schooled, hearing Bob's message loud and clear long before the infamous section in Rand's novel where Galt commandeers the planet's radio frequencies and delivers the single best cure for insomnia ever conceived by a speech maker. It asphyxiates me even now, 43 years later.

Atlas Shrugged was in fact completed, the college prep course passed and Bob's letter-perfect point very well taken ... and retained. I hope I never have to read that book, ever again.

R.I.P. Bob Youngblood, 1943 - 2016.

Altruism, capitalism, charity and drinking before noon.

A Dutch historian born the year before the Berlin Wall fell went viral.

Says Rutger Bregman, the hero of Davos: "No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there."

Bregman wasn't couching his critique in terms of altruism, but rather offering a prescription to treat capitalism's absurdly dystopian excesses.

“This is about saving capitalism,” he said. “Most innovation has come about through government spending. During the golden age period [after the second world war], there were way higher taxes on wealth, property, inheritance and top incomes. That’s what we need today if we are going to tame this beast called capitalism.”

It reminded me of Ayn Rand, who spent a lifetime arguing against altruism.

There are some ... who believe as Rand did: that those who rely on social systems are---to use her ugly term---“parasites,” and those who amass large amounts of private wealth are heroic supermen.

Her zealous disciples responded in kind.

Rand disciple Alan Greenspan, for example, initiated the era of “Reaganomics” in the early 1980s by engineering “an increase in the most regressive tax on the poor and middle class,” writes Gary Weiss, “the Social Security payroll tax—combined with a cut in benefits.” For Greenspan, “this was no contradiction. Social Security was a system of altruism at its worst. Its beneficiaries were looters. Raising their taxes and cutting their benefits was no loss to society.”

Then Rand got old, became ill and opted to accept "parasitic" Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Rand taught “there is no such thing as the public interest,” that programs like Social Security and Medicare steal from “creators” and illegitimately redistribute their wealth. This was a "sublimely enticing argument for wealthy businessmen who had no interest whatever in the public interest.... Yet the taxpayers of America paid Rand's and Frank O'Connor's medical expenses." Randians have offered many convoluted explanations for what her critics see as sheer hypocrisy. We may or may not find them persuasive.

The preceding is intended as introduction to an interesting critique of "Effective Altruism," in a Jacobin article by Mathew Snow titled Against Charity.

A growing social movement ... brands itself Effective Altruism. Effective Altruists calculate where expendable income is best spent and encourage the relatively affluent to channel their capital accordingly. Among their most highly favored causes are the Against Malaria Foundation (which distributes insecticide-treated bed nets), the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (which works to establish school-based deworming programs), and GiveDirectly (which gives unconditional cash transfers to people in extreme poverty).

Over 17,000 people have pledged to give at least 1 percent of their income annually to such endorsed causes, and over 1,000 have pledged to give at least 10 percent. It is particularly popular among millennials, leading some to laud it as “the new social movement of our generation.”

In short, "Rather than creating an individualized 'culture of giving,' we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking."

The irony of Effective Altruism is that it implores individuals to use their money to procure necessities for those who desperately need them, but says nothing about the system that determines how those necessities are produced and distributed in the first place.

If we look at the institutions that make and allocate the resources others so desperately need, we must ask whether it is wrong to withhold those resources from others for the sake of payment and profit. Doing so not only seems morally reprehensible, it is morally reprehensible for precisely the same reason Effective Altruists argue it is wrong not to donate money to charities: it’s immoral to value some small sum of money (or what it might buy) over a human life or minimum standard of living.

In this way, Effective Altruism’s argument trades off an obvious moral truth without any mention of its direct tension with capitalist accumulation: as men and women with money and moral consciences, we can’t put a price on life, but as men and women participating in a system governed by the logic of capital, we must.

The absurd result is that Effective Altruism implores individuals to pay whatever price the market demands for basic necessities on moral grounds that cut against subjecting those necessities to capitalist market logic at all.

And the conclusion:

Rather than asking how individual consumers can guarantee the basic sustenance of millions of people, we should be questioning an economic system that only halts misery and starvation if it is profitable. Rather than solely creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

Just trying to inspire discussion over beers, y'all.

One Rand, two reactions.

The bizarre fetish of Reardon Metal was reprised in yesterday's C-J.

Libertarian candidate for Senate urges Hoosier voters to think small

Credit Ayn Rand. As a senior at Warren Central High School, Rebecca Sink-Burris devoured a copy of Rand's “Atlas Shrugged.” Young eyes were opened. A political foundation was formed.

Ms. Sink-Burris read "Atlas Shrugged" as a senior in high school, and the experience led her down a lifelong pathway to libertarianism.

I read "Atlas Shrugged" as a senior in high school, and the experience led me to ask aloud, "Is this Rand woman certifiably looney, or what?"

C'mon, folks: Erotic attractions to metal bracelets? That's just plain weird.