Fifty years ago this week, Ayn Rand’s gargantuan novel, Atlas Shrugged, was published by Random House. Critics on both the left and the right immediately savaged all 1,168 pages of it: the left, because it celebrated individualism, free enterprise and the dollar sign; the right, because it celebrated atheism, materialism and sex. Conservative pundit William F. Buckley once quipped that young people read Rand’s novels “less for their jackbooted individualism than for the fornicating bits.”

And yet, Atlas Shrugged would sell millions of copies, be translated in to all the world’s major languages and would remain in print to this day. Some 150,000 new copies of the book are sold every year in bookstores alone, and it ranks 388th on Amazon.com’s best-seller list.

Rand saw herself, grandly, as a “novelist-philosopher.” I would be more inclined to describe Atlas Shrugged as a soap-opera version of capitalism. Like all successful soap operas, it has melodrama, suspense, sex and clearly-identified heroes and villains.

From the marvelous opening line, “Who is John Galt?”, to the hero’s dramatic rescue over a thousand pages later, Rand pulls the reader along by skillful plotting and sheer narrative power. The exception is John Galt’s 60-page radio broadcast to the nation, expounding on Rand’s philosophy of individualism. When I read the novel, over 30 years ago, I read the first five or six pages of Galt’s long-winded broadcast before skipping ahead. The heck with philosophy, I thought. I wanted to find out what happened next.

Rand’s characters have no complexity. They are all either Nietzschean supermen, like John Galt, or else they are mean-spirited, envious parasites with names like Wesley Mouch. Nor does Miss Rand make any serious attempt to deal honestly with opposing points of view.

Consider, for example, Francisco d’Anconia’s “money” speech that occurs about a third of the way through the novel. Francisco is a South American copper magnate, who takes advantage of an elegant party to lecture his American hosts on the true meaning of money. The essence of the speech is contained in these two paragraphs:

To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money –- and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being –- the self-made man –- the American industrialist.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose -- because it contains all the others –- the fact that they were the people who created the phrase “to make money.” No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity –- to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words “to make money” hold the essence of human morality.

Now there is much truth in this speech. The great industrialists of the 19th and early 20th Centuries –- Carnegie, McCormick, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Ford and the others –- did make their fortunes by creating wealth, rather than by expropriating it, and in the process they created a living standard for the mass of Americans that was and is the envy of the world.

But the story is not that simple. Even in those early days, a pure, competitive market economy never existed in this country. We industrialized behind sky-high tariffs -– tariffs lobbied for and zealously defended by the business community. The federal government subsidized the building of the first intercontinental railroads through land grants to private corporations. Politicians at all levels were bribed to enact laws favorable to the new industrialists. Initial attempts by workers to strike for higher wages were crushed by police or federal troops, or by private armies of Pinkerton detectives. There was, in short, plenty of chicanery, favor-seeking and resort to brute force by the men Miss Rand calls “the highest type of human being.” As Milton Friedman once wryly remarked, “All any businessman wants is a fair advantage.”

But no character in Atlas Shrugged is allowed to give Francisco d’Anconia a real answer to his argument. The only reply that Rand permits comes from a silly dowager who can say no more than, “I don’t feel that you’re right, so I know that you’re wrong.” End of discussion.

Rand is supposed to have disliked the operas of Richard Wagner. That is curious, because the two artists were much alike. Both created on a monumental scale. Both invented mythical worlds divided between gods and heroes on one side, and stupid giants and malevolent dwarfs on the other. Both were full-blooded romantics who gloried in sex, violence and epic struggles. But Wagner, at least, was realistic enough to recognize that even the gods had flaws, and that those flaws would ultimately bring about their destruction. Perhaps that was why Rand rejected him: her own immortals are flawless. They have no defects, no contradictions and no doubts. They end up ruling the world in triumph instead of going down in blood and fire.

A century and a quarter after his death, people still thrill to Wagner’s operas. My guess is that people will still read Atlas Shrugged 50 years from now. Most of us know that we are not gods, but there are times in all of our lives when we would like to feel as if we were.