Atlas Shrugged at 50...

...makes one wonder how the characters would have fared in the real world....

John Galt would have put his miraculous motor into production. Two weeks later, the design would have been copied by a Chinese company that then sold exact copies for 10% of Galt's asking price. After the bankruptcy court finished with him, Galt would have taken a job selling house siding produced by Hank Rearden's mills;

Dagny Taggart and her illegitimate children -- at least one each from Francisco d' Anconia and Hank Rearden, who were in such a rush to bop her that they neglected to use any birth control devices -- would have become Galt's sole support after his motor idea unwound, but Dagny would soon have tired of this and moved in with Francisco, at least until she found out that he really did enjoy messing about with the chicks from his "worthless-playboy" days. Her railroad, unable to compete with other forms of transport, took aid money from the reconstituted US government and now operates a line between Milan, Michigan and Kankakee, Illinois;

Hank Rearden, too, would face the bankruptcy process. Cheap imported steel, lax safety standards and complaints about the pollution spewed by his mills did him in. Besides, most people didn't want blue-green houses;

Francisco d'Anconia, an illegal alien, would have been deported. After returning to Spain, he went big into leveraged buyouts, destroying all the businesses run by Galt's admirers and making himself a fine pile o' money;

The American public, realizing that Galt and his pals had never run for office or established their legitimacy as dictators, would have demanded their arrests. Trials would be pending, though most vanished back to Galt's Gulch, where those unable to think big thoughts were employed as gun-toting guards to repel any unwanted visitors;

The American government, crippled by a lack of revenue, shut down. Then, someone noticed that private companies run by Galt's cronies were billing them individually for each fire extinguished, each pothole filled, and they were now helpless against foreign invaders since the Galtists had no interest in supporting any military, met in Washington to demand that a limited government be imposed;

Pollution from the unrestrained manufacturing envisioned by Ayn Rand grew so bad that the new government imposed severe restrictions. Several former Galt followers attempted to do penance, setting up a campaign to plant trees, tear down unnecessary structures and break up highways-to-nowhere built to satisfy the Galtists' need to make Nature vanish;

The sole survivor of the Galt debacle was the cigarette factory established by the Galtists. It turned out that these were vile weeds indeed, and all who smoked them are currently on respirators.