Summary Of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

Prompt: Capitalism’s defenders usually appeal to the public good as the moral justification of capitalism. Contrast this approach to defending capitalism with Ayn Rand’s approach in Atlas Shrugged. In your answer, consider what Rand has to say in her 1965 essay “What Is Capitalism?”

Undeniably, capitalism offers great benefits to society at large. As individuals leverage capital to increase the productivity of their labor and to produce wealth, the entire economy is strengthened. Those who support capitalism are quick to appeal to this wide-spread benefit in their defense of capitalism. While these positive effects should not be ignored, they do not serve as a moral justification for capitalism. To argue this way would be equivalent to saying,

The socially minded may object; if man is free to seek his own good, doesn’t that mean that he may choose to take advantage of another to ensure what is best for himself? However, to cause harm to another man is not within man’s rights. One man’s right to life is not greater than another man’s right to life. To harm another man is to infringe upon his right to life, and is immoral. A man can, and most certainly should, seek his own good without infringing on the rights of any other man, because this is good. It is moral for man to be free to exercise rational thought, to produce, and to keep what he has produced as private property. In a social context, capitalism is the only moral option because by protecting private property it sanctions man’s freedom to

Here, the wealth belongs to the man who produced it, and he is free to use it however he wishes. In this capitalist system, the good of one man does not exclude the good of another man, because every man has the right to think, work, and advance his own life. He can enter into voluntary business arrangements at his own will and he can utilize his own wealth as he sees fit, but he cannot exert force on another man or take something he has not earned. Capitalism protects every man’s right to life, because there is no place for compulsion or force in a system of “equal, mutual, voluntary agreement” (482). If the purpose of capitalism is to serve the public, then it is reasonable for the government to take measures for the sake of the public good. These government impositions are rooted in a collectivist morality, and do not protect the individual. A collectivist morality assumes a man belongs to the collective. He is the resource of the other people, and his birth into the collective serves as his consent to be used. He can be told how to think and what to produce, then the products of his labor belong to the collective. He is not free to determine how the products of his mind and labor are used, as wealth is expropriated by those more powerful than him. Any wealth that he produces belongs to the collective. This is immoral because a man has no autonomy.