The cultural elite are panning the movie “Atlas Shrugged II,” which opened two weeks ago. Don’t be bamboozled. The movie is a nail-biter.

You’ll watch train passengers speed unknowingly to their deaths inside a Rocky Mountain tunnel and the movie’s heroine swerve through mountain passes in a small plane chasing a scientist with a secret.

But this movie isn’t just entertainment. It is also a chilling look at what America will become if Barack Obama is elected to a second term. That’s the reason it’s getting maligned by critics.

In the movie, America has fallen into the hands of politicians who demonize the producers of wealth, rail against the injustices of capitalism, and demagogue the crowds with demands for their “fair share.”

Oil companies, drug firms and the steel industry are vilified. Economics Czar Wesley Mouch announces that “no longer will the greed of a few businessmen outweigh the needs of the public at large.”

Entrepreneurs such as Hank Rearden who invented a metal lighter and stronger than steel, and Dagny Taggart, who built a transcontinental rail system, are told they must surrender to Washington’s control. Business decisions must be made for the common good. It’s Obama’s “You didn’t build that.”

The consequences are devastatingly close to becoming reality. Ayn Rand wrote her prescient novel in 1957. She anticipated the demonization of profits by power-hungry politicians. The words used by Mouch in Rand’s novel are precisely the words Obama and Vice President Joe Biden utter to defame the 1%.

What will be the results? Rand depicts an America of ragged crowds filling public squares, looking like Occupy Wall Streeters. Gasoline tops $40 a gallon. Stores are boarded up, families beg for food and shelter. Government predators rail against “sticklers for the Constitution” and impose more and more edicts and taxes on business, wringing the last pennies from dying enterprises.

In the movie, the U.S. is in economic meltdown. Rather than participate as willing accomplices in the destruction of their businesses, entrepreneurs such as Rearden and Taggart say enough is enough, and stop producing altogether.

Like Atlases holding up the world even as they bled, finally they shrugged and said no more. In the end, the whole nation loses. Fair warning.

* McCaughey is former lieutenant governor of New York and author of “The Obama Health Law: What It Says and How to Overturn It.”

Source: Investors.com

Watch the movie trailer here: