PG, this is a very interesting comment to me. The reason I say this is that I cite your article 'Mind the Gap' at www.paulgraham.com/gap.html as a an excellent distillation of the key points of Atlas Shrugged with a bit of a technology focus. I had believed that Atlas Shrugged was an inspiration for this article. I guess I was wrong and you have independently argued a lot of the same concepts.

Yes, I have read both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in the last couple of years, and they were viewpoint-changing events for me. They are lengthy, but it was worth the read for me. My key takeaway is that personal freedom and the ability for individuals to focus on their goals with as little artificial interference as possible leads to the greatest societal gain.

I mostly agree with your statement that "personal freedom and the ability for individuals to focus on their goals with as little artificial interference as possible leads to the greatest societal gain", and I probably agree with whatever PG wrote in 'Mind the Gap' (it's been a while), but Rand seems like something else. She turns it into an extreme ideology, throws in way too much certainty (do her hero's ever consider the possibility that other people are right and they are wrong?), and wraps it up in a long, boring book.

Agree that she takes the message to an extreme that isn't realistic in many cases. It's hard for me to imagine a person being able to live a happy life taking the message to the extreme Rand does in AS. Also, Atlas Shrugged is extremely long for the message it delivers.

However, I actually enjoyed the book and the story. Before I read the book, I had a lot of random and poorly formed ideas about what was economically moral, and this really helped me to crystallize my viewpoints.

If I'd been summarizing a book of someone else's, I'd have said so.

I didn't mean to imply that essay was merely a summary of another book. 'Mind the Gap' is my favorite essay in the collection on your site. To me, it argues very convincingly that capitalism is the best economic model the world has. This is a very big picture question, and the fact that the essay argues this so concisely and effectively makes it great.

My point was poorly made. Stated more clearly, in my view, this essay is a work that shares the spirit of a lot of the same lines of thought as AS (though wholly unique in its focus). In addition to this essay being great on its own merits, I recommend this essay to anyone who is interested in getting a flavor of some of the big picture questions AS discusses.

Me too. Having detested Catcher in the Rye and Slaughterhouse Five as a teen, I stopped reading books that seemed to only be popular within the context of being a teenager. It was definitely a good move.

Whoah, you're weird. Salinger and Vonnegut are Good (with a capital G).

Wow, we're definitely on opposite sides of this one. Atlas Shrugged is on my list of life-changing books. I've long since moved on from objectivism (I'm now a Rothbardian), but it was Rand who first got me thinking coherently about property and social obligation. OTOH, I found Cather in the Rye pretty shallow, and Slaughter Five just seemed like dada. Vonnegut did some great work (Harrison Bergeron comes to mind), but that book is not among it.

"Wow, we're definitely on opposite sides of this one."

Not sure where you got that. All of my posts on this topic should make clear that I'm a very big Rand fan, and have read all of her books (really, all of them). I would never call myself a SOME-PERSONS-NAMEian of any sort, so perhaps that's the difference. I do sometimes refer to myself as an anarcho-capitalist, so, philosophically, your Rothbardian views and mine probably coincide more than they differ. ;-)

I actually did enjoy Atlas Shrugged. But the speech is too much, the book too long (by about half), and the characters are weak (for such a long book). When I first started reading Rand, I wanted to share her books with everybody. So I recommended Atlas, her opus, to everybody I knew. None of them made it through the book. All got bogged down in the speech, and either gave up, or skimmed the rest of it. Even people who were reasonably heavy readers (though mostly pulp) still couldn't stomach the whole thing. I started recommending Anthem after that, and everybody made it through...everybody enjoyed it...and some went on to read other Rand books (I recommend The Fountainhead next).

I still believe that intelligent people can get everything they really need to know about Rand's philosophy from Anthem. And, of course, dumb folks can actually read Anthem, understand it, and enjoy it.

But, you're definitely weird to think "Catcher in the Rye" is shallow. Perhaps you like a lot of words in your stories. I don't. Word of advice: Stay away from Hemingway, you won't like it.