Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, is the kind of book that you cannot put down. It will be 3:00 am and you will feel compelled to read a few more pages.
What would happen to the world if the government increased regulations over every business and the creator of those businesses just quit, disappeared, retired?
Business people are denounced as bloodsucking leeches who feed on the weakness of others, but what would happen if those people just stopped innovating? Society as a whole would regress.
In Atlas Shrugged, the regression of society is taken to an extreme where society can no longer function. Those entrepreneurs who risk their lives and well-being for their own self-interest are a fundamental part of society and without them, we are back to dark ages.
Atlas Shrugged is a 1957 novel by Ayn Rand. Rand’s fourth and final novel, it was also her longest, and the one she considered to be her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing. Atlas Shrugged includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance, and it contains Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction. The theme of Atlas Shrugged, as Rand described it, is “the role of man’s mind in existence”. The book explores a number of philosophical themes from which Rand would subsequently develop Objectivism. In doing so, it expresses the advocacy of reason, individualism, and capitalism, and depicts what Rand saw to be the failures of governmental coercion.
I cannot recommend this book enough.