• • • Hoover’s FBI thought It’s A Wonderful Life was communist propaganda 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  | With Ayn Rand’s economic philosophy gaining serious repute with today’s Republican party leaders, the political message of It’s A Wonderful Life seems to carry an adversarial tone against the GOP’s ethos of rugged individualism. In her trans-generational best-seller, Atlas Shrugged, Rand writes of “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” She later argued in The Voice of Reason that man should “exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.” While many view It’s A Wonderful Life as a parable about the virtues of community and the value of human empathy, Rand would most likely have viewed it as a cautionary tale, pointing out that George Bailey’s youthful exuberance could have lent the world many technological innovations in the field of architecture, when instead he strangled his passions in favor of becoming another cog in the wheel of socialism.      View blog reactions