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From my personal experience Globalization may have been the first step into Galt's Gulch. In the late 80s and early 90s I was buying specialized equipment and parts and sometimes they had to be custom fabricated. Over time it became a full time job just to ride herd on the process. We bought from domestic suppliers. Almost every order had problems associated with it. Wrong Parts. Wrong specifications. Delayed shipments. Shoddy workmanship. Reps continually lying about what they could do and when they could do it. It was a mess.

Out of sheer desperation I began to order from foreign sources (Japanese). Lead time was a little longer but it went back to being a two-step process again, order and receive. Important parts could be air freighted. Every order would be exactly what I had ordered and the workmanship and packaging was perfect. Manufacturing has since gone to China but the story is the same. With shipping our costs are about the same or a little higher but we have enormous savings in time and aggrivation. We don't have a project tied up because some idiot with a hangover pulled our order.

In Shrugged the producers retreated to Galt's Gulch but that is not the only option available to them now. They may, instead, retreat to where they can produce or the entire process may shift to peoples and countries not so mired in a smug incompetence.