“That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which ‘has resolved personal worth into exchange value,’ ‘has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash-payment.” The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1,168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: ‘And I mean it.’ But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired ‘naked self-interest’ (in its time and place), and for much the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment. The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.” (originally published 12/28/1957; posted 10/12/07)