[paul]

I mostly agree with your statement that "personal freedom and the ability for individuals to focus on their goals with as little artificial interference as possible leads to the greatest societal gain", and I probably agree with whatever PG wrote in 'Mind the Gap' (it's been a while), but Rand seems like something else. She turns it into an extreme ideology, throws in way too much certainty (do her hero's ever consider the possibility that other people are right and they are wrong?), and wraps it up in a long, boring book.

[bp001]

Agree that she takes the message to an extreme that isn't realistic in many cases. It's hard for me to imagine a person being able to live a happy life taking the message to the extreme Rand does in AS. Also, Atlas Shrugged is extremely long for the message it delivers.

However, I actually enjoyed the book and the story. Before I read the book, I had a lot of random and poorly formed ideas about what was economically moral, and this really helped me to crystallize my viewpoints.