After reading The Fountainhead, I head to hit up Rand’s other books. They just make so much sense, although there are certainly things that she gets wrong.
Update: I would just like to say that I had very little problem with Atlas Shrugged, but the biggest one is about her support for the gold standard. Specifically, gold is valuable for its metallurgical properties (conductivity, ductility), its beauty and its rarity; the major governing factor of the three is the rarity.
In Galt’s Gulch, Ragnar Danneskjold says, “In the form of a flight from mid-Atlantic to Colorado in a plane loaded with gold beyond the safety point of its capacity. Wait till Midas sees the amount I have to deposit. My customers, this year, will become richer by — Say, have you told Miss Taggart that she’s one of my customers?” Later, Midas Mulligan says, “It’s the destruction of Colorado that started the growth of this valley, Ellis Wyatt and the others came to live here permanently, because they had to hide. Whatever part of their wealth they could salvage, they converted into gold or machines, as I had, and they brought it here…” Presumably elsewhere, there are other example. All in all, it is strongly suggested that gold is actual wealth.
However, this is no so – the machines and raw materials that people possess are wealth – indeed, in other parts of the book Rand acknowledges this. By bringing more gold to Galt’s Gulch, no one is creating wealth, they are just creating inflation (and incidentally, creating wealth for themselves at the expense of others). On the scale of the whole world, the gold standard should work quite well, but in a small community such as Galt’s Gulch, there is just too much opportunity to game the system for it to be a workable solution.
Working Through the BookLog 