“[I]t doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that eventually government will go awry. In fact the ultimate riff on government came out roughly 1,957 years (give or take about 33 years) before Atlas Shrugged, when someone, probably a clever proto-Objectivist, quipped, ‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,’ as if to warn us that eventually the government is going to do what it wants to do, and the rest of us are better off worrying about more important things. No, if you are looking for the most complete forecast of today’s economic and political turmoil in 20th century literature you will have to look beyond Rand’s one-dimensional economic vignettes to a work of scope and sophistication: Douglas Adams’s all-encompassing masterpiece, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams prognosticated the current scenario in such detail that it is hard to know where to begin accounting for his accuracy. But perhaps a good place would be the election of Barack Obama, who in Adams’s framework is a giant lizard.” (01/13/09)