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BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU 169
Throughout the novel Rand demonstrated a keen appreciation for
capitalism’s creative destruction and a basic comfort with competition
and fl ux. A worker on Taggart Transcontinental admires the prowess of
a competitor, stating, “Phoenix-Durango is doing a brilliant job” (16).
By contrast, her villains long for the security of a static, planned economy.
One bureaucrat declares, “What it comes down to is that we can
manage to exist as and where we are, but we can’t afford to move! So
we’ve got to stand still. We’ve got to stand still. We’ve got to make those
bastards stand still!” (503). Rand lavished loving attention on railroad
economics, industrial processes, and the personnel problems of large
companies. She had conducted extensive research on railroads while
writing the book, and her fascination with and respect for all industry
shone through the text. As she described the economy, Rand avoided
the language of science or mechanism, employing instead organic metaphors
that present the economy as a living system nurturing to human
creativity and endeavor. To her, money was “the life blood of civilization”
(390) and machines the “frozen form of a living intelligence”(988).
The market was the repository of human hopes, dreams, talents, the
very canvas of life itself.
Ignoring the daily drudgery of economic life, Rand portrayeds capitalism
and capitalists as creative, even glamorous. Dagny and Hank rush
from one crisis to the next, the fate of their companies always hanging
on a single decision that only they can make. Every company mentioned
in Atlas Shrugged, from the smallest concern to the largest multinational
corporation, is eponymous, signifying the link between individual and
fi rm. Rand also tied corporate capitalism to individuals through her
focus on inventions and discoveries. Many of her protagonists have
an entrepreneurial bent and accumulate wealth through an ingenious
invention or by making a scientifi c breakthrough. Even Dagny, whose
railroad is the emblematic old-economy business, is successful because
she has an outstanding conceptual grasp of the marketplace and is the
only executive who understands the potential of new technologies to
improve her operations.
With its blend of old-fashioned economic individualism and modern
corporatism, Atlas Shrugged is simultaneously nostalgic and visionary. 5
Rand drew a clear connection between her ideal of capitalism and the
imagined American past. When the competent go on strike, they retreat
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