Atlas Shrugged

[openbook booknumber=”0451191145″]
[rating:2/5]
My second attempt at reading an Ayn Rand novel went off even worse than my first. I’m going to basically cover all the things I found wrong with Anthem and include a few more basic problems I have with her philosophy.
Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical novel written by Ayn Rand, and her last before she turned from novel writer to full time philosopher. The novel outlines and supports her basic tenets of Objectivism.
The theory I don’t have a problem with, generally, my problem is mainly how it is applied in this novel and the way people are using this book to support conservative attempts to have the market limitations put in place during this latest recession be repealed as it is “harming market growth”. This novel is also being used as an argument against the new health care initiative and as a way of gainsaying the economic stimulus package and the green jobs it has created. All of these arguments ignore one vital point: in the novel the market failed because of the market limitations that were put in place on a market that was going on just fine before hand, in the real world the market failed because of circumventions to the market limitations in place and because some market limitations that needed to be in place were not there creating an untenable situation that ultimately collapsed. A circumstance most pundits seem to be glossing over for their own reasons.
Anyway, back to the story. In the story a man saw all of these market limitations and, taking it a step further, resulting socialist states in the novel and decided he would show them how their system would not, could not and should not work by “stopping the motor of the world”. And, he did. To keep from spoiling too much of the plot, since it is an interesting piece of literature, I will have it suffice to say that the main character, a woman named Dagny Taggart, learns along with the reader about the philosophy of Objectivism through out the story through a variety of circumstances and an increasingly dire state of living. Meanwhile she attempts to run her brother’s railroad against increasingly insurmountable odds as the government changes around her. Soon her world starts to give up and come to a standstill. The freeloaders and beggars win in a world where all is equal, since the hard workers have to give, and they have but to receive. Dagny gives until she can give no more, and then she learns the truth: Who is John Galt?