Atlas Shrugged EXECUTIVE Summary, Chapter 12

altas3Dagny Taggart: Capitalist Engineer, name your price to fix the Miracle Motor that I took from someone else’s property to use for my own profit!

Capitalist Engineer: I’ll take a low salary, now, but when I’ve discovered how it works, I’ll squeeze you!

Dagny: Okay!

Kit Bradley: Waitasec, isn’t he just saying he’s going to break his contract with you? Why are you hiring him?!

Capitalist Engineer: But I want to keep working at the Utah Institute of Technology, because they have a lab there that I’m using. I’m actually a night watchman, but I just ignore the job they’re paying me to do, to steal their power and supplies, to do what I want to do.  Work is very important to CAPITALISTS.

Dagny: I hate looters who want to tax me for the benefit of society, but love CAPITALISTS who just take other people’s stuff without asking or remuneration! That’s not looting! Hired!

Jim Taggart: I’m getting married to a retail worker.

Dagny: I never bothered to meet this woman who is marrying my brother, but I’ll be sure to insult him and her at their wedding! Remember, JIM is the bad guy, here!

Hank Readen: My wife is bullying me to go to the wedding to show off that she can make me show up. Don’t look at me, Dagny! My wife is here!

Dagny: Hank’s wife will try to get the ugly bracelet back from, that I bought three hundred pages ago, and hasn’t come up since, so it doesn’t look like we’re having an affair. Despite the fact it’s obvious we are having an affair, and I’m virtually bragging about it, no one will see that we’re having an affair.

Commie Businessmen: We will repeat the same lame things we’ve been repeating before, in the exact same language.

Capitalism Protagonists: Will offer the same accusations as given in the previous 300 pages of the novel.

Francisco d’Anaconia: I’ll show up at the wedding, uninvited. No one will throw me out for some reason! I will shred the same paper tigers as before, with the same language as before!  Repetition is awesome!

Commie Businessmen: Money is the root of all evil!

Francisco: Nonsense! I’ll monologue for five pages about this! I’ll say that rich people who inherit their money deserve to keep it! I’ll say that money has never been the servant of violence! I’ll make an impassioned defense of the GOLD STANDARD . . .

Kit: What the FUCK? The gold standard sucked! It is impossible to mine enough gold to grow the currency at the rate of the economy, meaning that money must either be devalued constantly or we’d face severe currency shortages! I . . . just realized I’m trying to talk sense at this idiot. Ahem.

Francisco: Then I’ll go on to say that the US has not used violence to increase its wealth, nor slavery! Even though the briefest of glances at the history of the United States shows this to be a factual error. I will also assert that the only resource is human ingenuity, with no basis in the material world at all. I will manage this with a straight face!

Hank: Golly, maybe you’re not so bad, after all.

Francisco: I am sabotaging my business to destroy the global economy.

Hank: I still like you, because I grasp that your soul is that of a CAPITALIST!

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