Atlas Summit 2016 at FreedomFest

The heroes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are successful businessmen. All readers of the novels can agree that the heroes behave heroically. But do they behave in ways that characterize successful businessmen?

This lecture will compare the behavior of Rand’s heroes with the insights of four authors in the classical-liberal tradition whose works identify key aspects of free-market business success: Samuel Smiles, Joseph Schumpeter, Ronald Coase, and Friedrich Hayek. Along the way, it will demonstrate that the classical liberal capitalist Charles Koch has adopted and updated all of these insights. It will then argue that Rand thoroughly understood the insights of two of these authors but slighted the insights of two others. And it will suggest that her moral and aesthetic philosophy may have been responsible for her oversights.