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Friday, September 21, 2012

Politics: The 53 Percent Shrugged

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Politics
The 53 Percent Shrugged
The new installment of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy is deadly. Not in a good way.
By Dave Weigel
Posted Thursday, Sep 20, 2012, at 11:26 PM ET

"Steve Jobs died," says John Aglialoro. "But let's say he disappeared and left a little note that said: 'Who is John Galt?' Hey, where the hell's Steve Jobs? I don't know. It's only Earth. Did he get in a spaceship? Where'd he go? In 2012, we've got men and women going on strike."

Aglialoro is the co-producer of the Atlas Shrugged film trilogy, and he is full of rhetorical questions. It's Sept.18, and we're sitting across a table at the Heritage Foundation shortly before the first-ever screening of Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike. Aglialoro's co-producer, Harmon Kaslow, sits nearby, sporting one of the Atlas pins that sell for $14.95 on the film's website. Washington is still talking about the video of Mitt Romney deriding the "47 percent" of voters too dependent on the federal teat to vote Republican.

So Aglialoro wants me to think of Atlas Shrugged as a history of the future. "Most entitlements are promises made by politicians to the unwilling," he says. "We've got generations of people on welfare. That's not because there weren't job opportunities, or education, or anything like that. We've got a problem of greed on the level of the entitlement class. Not the producers and the entrepreneurs that are creating the tax revenue. They're the 53 percent. If we get to the tipping point, 57, 58 percent, then you're going to see people saying: How ...

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