From the if-you-don't-like-the-milk-get-a-new-cow department...
Howard Adamsky invokes the patron saint of libertarianism in Recruiting, Misery, and the OFCCP, wherein he makes the thoroughly-defensible argument that the OFCCP's Internet Applicant regulations are both onerous and useless in accomplishing the goal of promoting equal opportunity. That said, I can't help but wonder whether his thinking was insufficiently blown when he read Atlas Shrugged.
The OFCCP regulations apply to a very specific group of companies, namely, those who do a significant amount of government contracting. No government contracts, no OFCCP compliance requirements. Atlas features one especially memorable scene where two trains collide in the Winston Tunnel, killing everyone on board. Rand takes great pains to explain how everyone on board shared in the ethical responsibility for the malice and incompetence of the government that made such an accident possible. As she calls out the butcher's bill, Rand writes of one victim who deserved his fiery death*:
The man in Bedroom H, Car No. 5, was a businessman who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan, under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.
He was, in other words, a federal contractor. While I'm sure Rand would have no love lost for the OFCCP's rules, I suspect that she would also have scarcely even alligator tears for federal contractors' complaints of how much those rules itched. This is not Kelo v. New London, in which a private developer used government connections to run homeowners off their land for dubious public benefit, and the Supreme Court found a rationale to justify a blatant act of confiscation.
All that you need to do to avoid the OFCCP rules is to not take govermment contracts. If you're a recruiter, don't work for a government contractor. Central to the plot of Atlas is the transformation of Dagny Taggart and Howard Rearden, from businesspeople trying to keep going and working through government interference, into voluntary exiles like John Galt. If today's government contractors--the vast majority of whom are deeply honest, hard-working, and proud to serve the country--started to walk away from RFPs because of these (not to mention the million and one other, and often far more invasive) conditions of doing business, who knows what might happen. It's not happening yet, because, presumably, it's still worth the money.
Hey, I think it sounds a bit extreme too, but Ayn Rand closed Atlas with the words "And I mean it." Just saying!
* I can't be sure, but I suspect this scene is what inspired Whittaker Chambers to famously write,
From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"
Chambers understood better than most the central battle between the collective and the individual, between the Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and Mao Zedong's "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Chambers' devastating critque confirmed many of my misgivings even as I continue to admire the work as something that objectively reinforced individual liberty at a time when many felt it to be terribly gauche.
While I don't doubt that Atlas will continue to be read long after the Soviet Union and global communism come to be seen as something as quaint and impossible as the Ottoman Empire, I'm less convinced that it will possess the same relevance. Neither of the great schools of communism, China and the USSR, had any problem with modernity per se. In fact, both took literal wrecking balls to every symbol of traditional Russian and Chinese society that they could find.
Today, though, whether it's free trade that compels rust belt steelworkers to beat their plowshares into call centers, the notion of women's rights that shock and disgust tribal elders in Waziristan, or the generalized guilt and suspicion of progress and wealth that underlies much of the current global warming frenzy, the great challenge is reconcile progress with those whose cherished ways of life it upsets.
