Mistakes In Atlas Shrugged By Ayn Rand

It is no secret that humans make mistake. It is often said that mistakes are what make us human. There is no argument when it is said that there are many mistakes that characters in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ make, but it seems that those mistakes are what molded the characters and allowed them to be used just how the author Ayn Rand wanted them to be. It was clear that she had a certain way that she planned the novel to go and that she planned to use mistakes to get it there. One character that she uses is none other than the infamous James Taggart. The man whom is known as a dim bulb when it comes to policies and how a railroad company should be ran, especially when he is compared to his sister Dagny Taggart. There seems to be no end to the mistakes

This not only led to the Phoenix-Durango getting the Wyatt’s Oil business, but it also made that line practically useless. However, he ended up trying to fix his own mistake by him and the Washington Boys passing the Anti Dog-Eat-Dog rule which is mentioned on page sixty-nine. This did not fix his problem all of the way however, because that mistake led to many more which in turn caused Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart to practically run around like savages together to try and scrounge up enough materials needed to run the mills and the railroad. In the end, it led to Dagny crying out, ‘If that’s the price of getting together, then I’ll be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can’t be punished for being good. One can’t be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we’d better start slaughtering each other, because there isn’t any

This would seem like a mistake simply for the fact that it is proven later on in the novel that anyone who had gotten on Dagny’s bad side ended up going into the darkness which was actually proven to be a haven of some sort. The reason that Dagny was even in his office was another mistake that he had made. James Taggart had decided that sinking the funds the fix the Rio Norte line into the San Sabastian Mines which was being done by none other than the infamous playboy Fransisco D’Ancconia. What he did not foresee however, is that Fransisco would use the mines to make many investors crash and burn in the stock market in the end and send them scrambling for the cash that they had foolishly implanted. This mistake would be made worse by D’Ancconia Copper going down the hill for the rest of the novel. Dr. Pritchett said it best when he stated this line. “Man? What is man? He’s just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.”

It may seem to a reader that it was only when James Taggart met his soon to be wife Cherryl Brooks. When he met her in a dime-store, he was attracted to the idea that he would have someone whom he could share his values with and his views on how horrible his sister was. However, when she