["Atlas Shrugged"] is the equivalent of a fifteenth-century morality play. Everyman, personified by Dagny Taggert, the strong-minded lady Operating Vice President of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, and by her lover, Hank Rearden, the steel tycoon, struggles against the forces of evil as represented by the bureaucrats, the scientists who sell their minds to the bureaucrats, and the craven businessmen who string along for fear of honest competition. What Hank and Dagny do not realize is that Evil seeks to destroy them precisely because they are strong and fearless. To outwit Evil the half-legendary hero John Galt cooks up an apocalyptic conspiracy, a "strike of the men of the mind." Hank and Dagny are saved, but not until by their own will they accept salvation.
The author challenges not only the concept of the welfare state but the whole Christian ethic of concern by the strong for the weak—challenges it, what's more, on the score of immorality and its tendency to sap the strong and corrode the human urge toward freedom. For readers willing to go the distance, to re-examine their own convictions, and to put up with the incidental tripe, "Atlas Shrugged" may well be worth wading through. There is no denying that it leaves a powerful, disturbing impression.
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