Randroids tend to characterize Galt's strike in Atlas Shrugged as a form of passive resistance and non-cooperation - which goes to show their selective memory of the novel. Galt might have slacked off while he held a menial job on a railroad and stalked Dagny Taggart. But Galt's buddies Ragnar and Francisco, with his complicity, engage in industrial sabotage, in effect "breaking windows" with the goal of making the economy better for themselves in the future. For some reason this aspect of the novel, namely, economic terrorism carried out by "the good guys," doesn't receive the attention it deserves.
If, in the real world, environmentalists or Muslims (both groups figure prominently in Objectivist demonology) went around blowing up factories, mines, ships, port facilities and other forms of industrial capital, Objectivists would scream for the arrest and execution of such malefactors and "man haters." But they turn a blind eye towards the same tactics when Rand's fictional heroes use them, because apparently the ends justify the means. Do Objectivists want to keep the threat of economic terrorism to themselves, even though they would see the same effects if others carried it out for reasons different from theirs? What if, in the novel, Ragnar had destroyed Taggart's railroad bridge across the Mississippi, instead of its accidental destruction caused by the scuffle between the villains Cuffy Meigs and Doctor Stadler at Project X? Would that make its destruction morally defensible in the Objectiverse?
This provides yet another example of Rand's antinomianism which I find troubling. Yet many conservatives have latched onto Atlas Shrugged as the bible of the Right, without necessarily sharing Rand's irreligion. They've also endorsed the film version as a kind of infomercial for the novel. I would like to see a "philosophy for living on earth" as much as anyone. But can't we do better than Rand's deeply flawed "Objectivism"?
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