Ayn Rand's capitalist utopian novel, Atlas Shrugged, enshrines self-interest and condemns the brotherly love recommended above by Gerald Starnes, one of several hapless businessmen encountered by the novel's heroine, Dagney Taggart.

The villains of Rand's novel are unscrupulous and lazy captains of industry who inherited control over wealth from their hardworking fathers. These laggards then either squandered their fortunes in misplaced concern for the common good or preserved them by manipulating the government to squelch the competitive excellence of the true economic heroes of the day.

Written in the 1950s, Rand's fictional account endorsed libertarian capitalism at the height of the Cold War. Forty years later, the Cold War came to an abrupt end with the fall of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Eastern Europe, leaving defenders of capitalism with a heady self-confidence unprecedented in the history of markets. One commentator even proclaimed, “We are all capitalist now.”