Last October marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and the occasion received widespread media attention. The book still sells 150,000 copies per year. It is long, tedious, and intellectually vulgar. And yes, I did try to get through it once. Rand was a deeply troubled woman. She and William F. Buckley did not get along. Meeting at a social event, Rand told him, “You’re too smart to believe in God.” Buckley had a great deal of fun with the thinly disguised Rand character in his 2004 novel, Getting It Right. Rand exuberantly flaunted her belief in “the virtue of selfishness,” and, like a bargain-basement Nietzsche, mocked the Christian virtues of self-sacrifice and charity. David Kelley is the founder of the Atlas Society and has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that concludes with this: “We will know the lesson of Atlas Shrugged has been learned when business people, facing accusers in Congress or the media, stand up like Hank Rearden [a Rand hero] for their right to produce and trade freely, when they take pride in their profits, and stop apologizing for creating wealth.” Oh, come now. Business people should stand up for all those things, but that does not require chucking morality. On the contrary, freedom and productivity are best secured by a Christian and moral foundation. This truth is very convincingly set forth in John Paul the Great’s 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus, on which I did a book-length commentary, Doing Well and Doing Good (Doubleday, 1992). It is a pity that the Wall Street Journal runs such rot as an encomium to Ayn Rand, thereby reinforcing the stereotype that capitalism is a system of unbridled greed and selfishness. And it is a pity that so many business people are still reading Atlas Shrugged, thereby producing another generation of capitalists with a bad conscience, for they know deep down that their work and their lives are not adequately explained in terms of greed and selfishness.
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