kane

This is where some people seem to be off base. Have you read Atlas Shrugged? What starts the downfall in the book is the fact that a company creates a product (in this case a type of super strong steel) that is cheap to make, better than anything on the market and has a million uses. They quickly start controlling the market as more and more companies start buying that metal from this company and move away from regular steel. So the government steps in an forces them to let other companies and make and sell that metal. They make the company give up some of its market share and forbid them from manufacturing over a certain amount of it. So the guy that owns the company gets pissed and refuses to produce anything. He, along with many other barons of industry, start to turn their back on the government and without their "brilliance" and leadership things start to fail. As they start to fail the government takes more and more control of businesses.

Last I checked the government isn't forcing any companies to share their technology with other companies. Our situation is different. We had a financial system that started creating wealth out of thin air. They weren't selling or investing in an actual tangible good, they were simply creating wealth by betting on how good or bad companies would perform. Eventually, that bit them in the ass (of course this is a massive over simplification, but it is the overall theme of what happened). By then many of these companies were so big they were deemed "unable to fail" and were bailed out.

Nobody walked away because they were sick of government regulation. Nobody refused to manufacture goods or services out of protest.

There is a huge difference between what is going on right now and what happened in Atlas Shrugged. Are there some similarities? Sure. Is it the same? Not by a large margin.