In the last year or so there have been many comparisons between events in reality and those depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Many articles and internet memes pointed out the similarity between the decline of Detroit and the ruin of Starnesville in Atlas Shrugged. Both were thriving industrial areas that, due to collectivist, liberal policies essentially destroyed themselves.

I am currently re-reading Atlas Shrugged, listening to a series of podcasts by Dr. Diana Hsieh to help me get even more out of it, and another parallel jumped off the page at me. The scene is a meeting of the board of directors of Taggart Transcontinental, the major railroad in Atlas Shrugged, where they are dealing with the declining business which is making it more difficult to maintain the railroad, let alone make a profit. The board is looking for Dagny Taggart, the heroine of the book, to perform the impossible and save them from the consequences of their policies. When she points out that the dire condition of the railroad is a direct result of their decisions, the chairman of the board says:

Does it matter now who was to blame? We don’t want to quarrel over past mistakes. We must all pull together as a team to carry our railroad through this desperate emergency.

While this may seem to make sense, the idea that regardless of who is to blame action needs to be taken to save the railroad, in this reading it jumps out at me that the men of power who could have made different decisions are seeking to evade that responsibility while at the same time looking to Dagny to come to the rescue as she had many times in the past.

The “Does it matter” portion in the above quote struck me as familiar and I remembered Hilary Clinton’s oft repeated quote from the hearings on the attack on the embassy in Benghazi:

What difference at this point does it make Senator? … But, you know, to be clear, it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime.

The similarity between these two quotes is quite striking. In both, decisions could have been made that would have prevented the situation from developing as it did but no one, including those at the top of the hierarchy, the chairman in Atlas and Hilary Clinton in the case of Benghazi, made them and both seek to evade discussion of those decisions and their outcomes.