His intelligence and his fidelity, not his intentions and his sincerity, are what will slow my car when I am hurtling down the freeway at sixty or seventy miles per hour. If I have to have my brakes fixed, I care only about whether the person doing the work is honest and competent I don't care a wit for whether he means well. When I board an airplane or get behind the wheel of a car, I like to think that the governing principles are not charity and sincerity but excellence and fidelity. The idea that we should serve one another and that we should practice love and charity is appealing (as a Christian, I think them obligatory), but these principles are often applied in an almost strictly superficial sense.Ītlas traces the unseen, unintended consequences of so-called 'good intentions.' Henry Rearden, for example, points out that he cannot use his suppliers' good intentions to fuel his blast furnaces. The most interesting moral question occurring to me as I read it concerns the unintended consequences of supposedly good intentions. Life, if one would call it that, would be nasty, brutish, and short.

The mind responds to the problems presented by the physical and material environment, but without the application of intelligence, no production is possible.

Production is the outpouring of the human mind. The book is an extended lesson in what happens when we focus only on what we see.Ītlas Shrugged confronts its reader with a difficult and uncomfortable set of moral questions. In several places throughout the book, Rand explores how an 'emergency directive' to help someone in one part of the country leads to the ruin or suicide of a bankrupt entrepreneur in another part of the country. One of the most important principles in economics is that we rarely if ever take account of the unseen, unintended consequences of policies and actions. The producers are destroyed, and their destroyers continue to be oblivious to their destruction. The great tragedy I see throughout Atlas is the tragedy of what might have been. The second reason is its exploration of how a society disintegrates when we deny human nature. We see what happens throughout the book when people are unshackled and allowed to pursue their own goals. Something as mundane as a hot cup of coffee, for example, embodies innumerable decisions by innumerable people, each with their own specialized knowledge. A lot of things that we take for granted are the product of free markets harnessing the power of free minds. Atlas Shrugged is a brilliant exposition of the things that are made possible by the rational, thinking human mind. The first is its treatment of human potential.

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