I just finished reading this book (took three days) for the first time at age 56. I would not recommend it for young readers because they won't understand enough of it, but I gather that's who usually goes for it – the ideological set.

I know there was an earlier post on the book that didn't really get into the book: https://ovarit.com/o/Books/15769/book-club-2nd-thread-atlas-shrugged-by-ayn-rand-the-first-two-chapters

Some thoughts:

Book 1. There's a party at one point where almost everyone there is woke as hell. I found it hilarious but would not have understood it a few years ago. It's accurate.

Book 2. This is a horror story about what happens when incompetent woke people run the world. They run it into the ground. I was really horrified. Pleasetellmeitsfictionpleasetellmeitsfiction.

Rand was a teenager/young adult in the early years of Soviet Russia. Her middle-class father (whom she hero-worshipped) lost everything. It might have been in her biography that I read about the government confiscating houses of wealthier people and letting the owner family live all together in one room while giving other rooms to other people. Was there really that much homelessness in Russia at the time? Or was it just hostility to more successful people? At any rate, I found myself wondering how much of part 2 was exaggeration and how much was just ethnography/history. (Kind of like how 1984 is an ethnography of the Spanish Civil War.)

Book 3. This is the fantasy wish-fulfilment third act. John Galt lectures us for an entire chapter at one point.

I agree with a lot of what characters are saying about living your life with authenticity and integrity and pulling your own weight instead of leeching off others. I think the idea that people can just manage that somehow without good parenting and an environment that encourages competence instead of passivity (as our current factory assembly line model of education does – pet peeve: I didn't really learn how to use my mind until after finishing three science degrees) is a little naive, to say the least. There are things society can do to make it easier for people to be productive and competent, and things that can make it harder, and Rand does not explore that. I assume she didn't know how.

In addition, she's spent the entire book describing how the woke elite run the economy into the ground by introducing senseless regulations like limiting how many train companies can operate in each state (one) regardless of how much demand there is, how fast the trains can go or how many cars they can have, how much of a product manufacturers can produce and who they are allowed and not allowed to sell to in which quantities. These regulations aren't about safety, they're about making the competition "fairer" for less competent businesses. In addition, the government starts requiring private companies to keep their fees low and their wages high, and somehow not go bankrupt. All of this is treating private corporations like public services. Doesn't work.

And yet, her answer is to eliminate income taxes! There's even a pirate (from a rich family, of course) robbing governments (but not private corporations) and using it to refund abused industrialists their previously paid income taxes. She provided nothing to illustrate how paying taxes off profits harms high income earners or businesses, and tons of examples of over- and misregulation, yet her answer is no income tax? ???????

There are a lot of things to talk about here, especially since this book has influenced the right in the US and probably Canada (I don't know about elsewhere). I would argue that the problem with both Rand and Marx (I've tried reading Marx and Engels and to me they come across as overeducated rich kids who are understandably angry at their authoritarian fathers and project that onto the working classes – I have clearly read too much Alice Miller) is that they simply didn't have the tools to understand people and economies. They used simplistic one-sided ideologies because that's all they had.

There is a lot of oversimplification in this novel. I get that she hero-worshipped her father and that comes through here. These industrialists are perfect. No one is ever perfect. (Their inventions are over-the-top miraculous, too.) And the whiny woke rich kids may be right on point, but that doesn't mean there aren't arguments for some degree of social responsibility to those who are less able in the workplace for whatever reasons. We need private enterprise – it really is more efficient at what it does. But we also need counterbalances, too.

We need the logic of living systems (complexity, complex non-linear systems) in order to understand economic systems, social systems, and of course the environment. That is the antidote to the whole left-right divide.

I would argue that privately-owned businesses should always be left to the forces of natural selection, and that it's people who should be subsidized (basic income), so that jobs are also subject to natural selection (and housing). If people can afford to say no, then employers have no choice but to pay enough for the job at hand, which will be more for some jobs and less for others. Working conditions and what pay really is fair are still issues, especially for young inexperienced workers who can be taken advantage of.

Rand does not really address parenting and motherhood. There is only one woman that I recall who has children, and I didn't understand her take on parenting vs pulling her own weight economically. Everyone else has sex without pregnancy. No idea how they manage it.

The other thing, which is kind of amusing, is that Dagny, the heroine, has not one but four men to choose from, even though she doesn't do anything to be attractive to men. And all of them are one-woman men (as in, they may never find anyone else like her).