“The most notable literary response to last year’s financial crisis was not to turn to the obvious genre – books about Wall Street shenanigans in the 1920s – but to skip several historical stages and to go straight to Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, in which heroic titans of industry are persecuted by a meddling government. The book’s sales skyrocketed in early 2009, proving that when bankers puff asset bubbles and wreck the world, a large part of the public can be counted on to learn from that experience that bankers are the real victims of society, presumably deserving even more tax cuts and deregulation.”

(Tom Frank, “The Red Scare Returns”.)