Atlas Shrugged opens in a devastated New York City with crumbling buildings, empty stores, and closed businesses. It is a vision of an impoverished country in a communist world system, which slowly but surely destroys the national and foreign economy alike. As capable, productive workers and business owners are devastated by bureaucratic machinations, they begin to abandon the existing order one by one and mysteriously disappear. In the meantime, political and industrial parasites support each other and live off of the creative and productive "giants" who remain and who must support them.
Among the several industries that keep the weakened communist system from failing altogether is Taggart Transcontinental, the economic artery of the United States on which all the other industries depend, the largest and most reliable railroad in the country. Although Jim Taggart is.....
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