This book is widely described as the “bible of capitalism.” For nearly 70 years since it was first published in 1957, it has exerted an enormous and enduring influence on American politics, corporate culture, and economic thought. It is also the book that often described as the gateway drug to libertarianism, for reasons that will become obvious later.
But what makes it a go-to book for capitalism, or more precisely American capitalism? The entire theme of this novel is this: Socialism is bad, capitalism is good. It is told through a dystopian narrative set in near-future United States in a state of decline, with a collapsing society under the weight of socialist bureaucracy, collectivist regulations, and government overreach.
The narrative follows a character by the name of Dagny Taggart, who is a brilliant and independent Vice President of Operations for Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. She is the great grand daughter of the founder of Taggart, Nathaniel Taggart, where the company was passed down to Dagny and her brother Jim after their father Arthur Taggart passed away.
Now Jim Taggart is officially the president of the company, despite being largely incompetent and relies more on political cronyism, simply because he’s the older brother. But Dagny is the one who really runs the company and fights to keep the crumbling railway alive, despite incompetent executives and a flood of government regulations. She’s doing so by partnering with self-made steel magnate Hank Rearden, through utilizing his ultra-strong Rearden Metal to construct the very successful “John Galt Line” to service Colorado’s booming industrial sector.
However, as they work, they’re starting to notice a terrifying trend: The country’s best entrepreneurs, scientists, and artists one by one are starting to abandon their businesses and vanished without a trace. And as the economy worsens, the corrupt socialist government increasingly passes more suffocating regulations: Competence is heavily taxed, while private properties are seized to support the failing and politically-connected enterprises.
Moreover, Dagny’s childhood friend and former lover Francisco d’Anconia also has to deliberately sabotage his own global copper empire to keep the government from looting it. Even Hank Rearden gets into trouble and is put on a trial for illegally selling his metal, an accusation that he denies and refuses to apologize. And when they thought things cannot get any worse, the government enacts Directive 10-289 that completely freezes the economy, outlaws job changes, and most of all forces Rearden to sign over his metal patents.
But then a major turning point occurs in the novel, after Dagny suffers from a plane crash. In the aftermath, she stumbles upon a hidden, self-sufficient valley in the Rocky Mountains known as Galt’s Gulch. It is here where she discovers the missing innovators of a highly advanced electromagnetic motor that was left behind in an abandoned factory (in which she became obsessed with tracking down its creator). And the innovators are led by the enigmatic engineer John Galt.
Galt is the hero of the story, despite only appears in the 3rd part of this 1098 pages book. But he and his ideas were mentioned several times already throughout the book as an unnamed mysterious figure. In fact, the book opens with the question “who is John Galt?”, a throwaway phrase that the characters in the book eventually use to express hopelessness or shrug off unanswerable questions, where only later that they learn that he is a real person.
So, who is John Galt? He is Ayn Rand’s ideal man: rational, self-made, uncompromising, and unwilling to let his capabilities taken advantage by people who demand them as a duty. His long radio speech near the end of the book (60 pages long) lays out the core of Rand’s philosophy.
In the story, he is the mastermind who organized the “strike of the mind”, which convinced the world’s producers to withdraw their talents and refuse to support the parasitic regime. And the proceeding story evolves around the activities of Galt and his rebelling producers, where he subsequently got captured and tortured in the government’s desperate attempt to force him and his followers to restore the economy. Dagny and the producers eventually rescue Galt, as the socialist state begins their disintegration into darkness.
The novel ends with the producers preparing to return, ready to rebuild society that was destroyed by socialism, this time with the foundation of freedom and the glorious capitalism.
It is such a tiring book to read; mind you, not because of the length (many other 1000+ pages books are interesting) but because of the many distracted gibberish from the main plot, not to mention its repetitiveness.
Throughout the story Ayn Rand keep on showing the argument that individuals should live entirely for their own interest, with the pursuit of their own happiness as the highest moral purpose, while simultaneously demonizing altruism (the moral obligation to sacrifice oneself for others) and forced redistribution as a moral corruption. The novel also champions unregulated free markets as the only true moral economic system, because it respects individual rights, protects private property, and rewards merit.
Self interest in an unregulated market? No wonder that this book is so popular among predatory capitalists, corporatists, and plutocrats in the United States. It perfectly captures the very essence of American laissez-faire capitalism. And no wonder that it is also highly regarded by the libertarians, because the morality of rational self-interest and the dangers of government overreach are essentially core libertarian principles, although Rand repackaged them into her own philosophy called Objectivism and she ironically explicitly rejected libertarianism (and double irony, she also rejected the Republican Party, who is now championing her ideas).
Conversely, critics of the book – including many philosophers and economists – argue that the book oversimplifies the economic arguments and ignores the role of luck, public goods, and social cooperation. It also caricatures its characters and presents a stark contrast between what good and evil looks like.
For example, the government “looters” are almost cartoonishly incompetent and malicious like corrupt Soviet officials, while in the real world the advocats of government regulations and redistribution rarely look like that and more like the Scandinavians with their social democracy, the government of Singapore, or many other welfare states. Meanwhile, John Galt and the producers are portrayed as the most brilliant and moral bunch of people, with no greed and no tendency to commit fraud in an unregulated market, no desire for monopoly, or no intention to just dump pollution (because no regulation to prevent this).
And what about the title of the book? It refers to the story of Atlas, a mighty second-generation Greek Titan who after a defeat in the battle of Titans was condemned by Zeus to hold the heavy celestial sphere (the vault of the sky) on his shoulder for eternity.
In the novel, Atlas is equivalent to the producers who are condemned to carry the weight of the economy (the analogical celestial sphere). Because Rand argues that human reasoning and creative thoughts are the source of all production, wealth, and technological advancement – the very essence and products of the producers.
Meanwhile, Rand also argues that the evil and incompetence can only succeed when the good and competent agree to cooperate with them. Therefore, by refusing to cooperate with the state the producers are refusing to endure the burden while being condemned by the rotten society that the state has created.
This is as if Atlas just shrugged off the punishment by Zeus and proceeded to throw away the celestial sphere that he was supposed to hold forever.
But here’s the problem. The producers’ strike scenario (Atlas shrugging) assumes that few geniuses carry the entire economy, while in reality modern production relies more on huge network of specialized ordinary workers and institutions. Meanwhile, success in Rand’s mind is attributed almost entirely to individual merit; and in doing so she ignores the role of infrastructure, education, government safety net, courts, and legal order that makes private enterprise possible. These government-assisted environment, unsurprisingly barely appear in the book.
So all in all, I bought and read this book with the intention to get into the minds of the libertarians. And the revelations from it are quite scary. Because yes Rand diagnoses the real problems with socialist’s command economy, but without objectively balance it with the advantages of socialism. And what’s worst, she treats this as a 2-sided moral war but offers little evidence that pure laissez-faire would work better than the mixed economies that the majority of countries actually implement in the real world.
So, in a way this book is nothing more than a utopian dream (that’s right, a socialist dystopian novel wrapped inside a capitalist utopian dream – a takedown piece, if you will). And the scary part? Some of the most powerful people in the US actually believe in Rand’s extreme utopian view, and they are trying to force implement them in the real world. Which is the third irony, because Rand’s ethics actually forbid initiating force, so a government imposing her ideals would be a contradiction.
