The National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint last month to stop Boeing from building its new 787 in South Carolina rather than Washington State. As Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore explain in today’s Wall Street Journal, the Board’s action stems from Boeing’s declaration that it cannot “afford a work stoppage every three years” as has been happening in Washington. The New York Times seems to endorse the NLRB complaint, implying that the federal government must force companies to do business in agency‐​shop states like Washington, because otherwise they couldn’t compete with more efficient right‐​to‐​work states like South Carolina.


Laffer and Moore claim that the NLRB’s move is unprecedented, but it is actually highly reminiscent of the “Equalization of Opportunity Bill.” The EOB forbade entrepreneurs from owning more than one business, in order to allow less efficient, less capable entrepreneurs to compete with them. The EOB is, of course, a measure enacted by the United States Government in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.


Yet more evidence that the Obama administration is not only conversant with Rand’s classic, it is using the book as a policy model. It’s just a little confused as to which characters were the heroes and which the bad guys.