Editor's Note: The following is the text of a speech I gave to the Tuesday Morning Group, a pro-free-market group in Richmond, Virginia, on June 9, 2009.—RWT

A few weeks ago, some of you may have seen a news story about "missing millionaires" in Maryland. The Maryland legislature drastically raised state income taxes, but only on millionaires—and the result, when the next year's tax returns came in, was that a third of the state's millionaires disappeared.

This story immediately reminded me of Ayn Rand's classic novel Atlas Shrugged. The plot of the novel revolves around the idea of men of talent, including spectacularly successful businessmen, suddenly disappearing. This is what the title Atlas Shrugged refers to: what if the people who "hold the world on their shoulders" like Atlas, decided to shrug off that burden and let the world fall?

I'm not the only one who has been reminded of Ayn Rand's novel by recent events. Since the beginning of the financial crisis, and America's massive lurch to the left, a lot of people have discovered or rediscovered the novel. It has surged into the top 20 on Amazon.com's list of bestsellers, it has been recommended by some very prominent conservatives, including Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and anyone who has been to one of the "tea party" protests has probably seen a sign asking "Who Is John Galt?" which is a sort of tagline from the novel.

This is a 50-year-old novel—it was originally published in 1957—and the reason it's jumping back up onto the best-seller lists is because it still seems so timely.

What I want to talk to you about today is not just why should read Atlas Shrugged, because I am sure some of you already have, and most of you have heard some of the buzz about the novel and have been considering reading it. What I want to talk about is why people who are interested in liberty and in free markets and in controlling the size and power of government—why you need this novel. And I want to point specifically to the ideas in the novel that are most desperately needed.

The basic plot premise of the novel is that businessmen and men of talent and genius are disappearing. And the novel follows the heroine as she tries to discover how it is that they are disappearing, where they have been going, and most important why. Now I don't want to give away any plot spoilers by going into detail about the plot, because the important thing for our purpose is the "why": why is Atlas shrugging? Atlas Shrugged is a novel of ideas in the truest sense: in order to unravel the factual mystery of the story, our heroine has to unravel the novel's big philosophical question: what is the role of the entrepreneurs and innovators in a society? What motivates them, what are the conditions they need in order to work, and what would happen to the world without them?

Ayn Rand provided two unique answers to these questions.

The first was that the individual reasoning mind is the ultimate source of production and wealth. At one point, for example, our heroine is observing the motors of a railroad locomotive:

"For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for the first time."

This message may not seem as radical today as it did 50 years ago. It has since become commonplace to talk about the economy as being "knowledge-based." But the conclusion Ayn Rand drew from this is that force—coercive government intervention in the economy—is the greatest enemy of civilization. Government coercion means overriding the thinking of the individual. Government "planning" means smashing our own rational plans about what to do with our effort and our money.

You can't force someone to innovate and produce any more than you can force him to believe in a particular religious doctrine. If you try it, you actually end up stopping all thinking. That's why Ayn Rand said that we need separation of state and economics "in the same way and for the same reason" as separation of church and state. In both cases, it's a matter of recognizing the non-negotiable requirements of the individual mind.

This is certainly an idea we need now, when the Obama administration seems determined to erase all of the lessons of the failure of Marxism and is busy clubbing everyone over the head in order to impose its own vision of a centrally planned auto industry and a centrally planned financial industry.

The more radical answer to the big philosophical questions of the novel has to do with the motivations of the producer. Ayn Rand saw straight into the basic contradiction that is destroying capitalism. Everyone knows that businessmen and investors, and pretty much everyone in a free economy, are motivated by self-interest. And everyone believes that self-interest is evil. So no wonder capitalism is in crisis. It's not a financial crisis so much as it is a moral crisis: we have been morally opposed to the very thing that drives our economic system.

But let's question that basic moral premise. The idea of self-interest as evil depends on an old caricature of self-interest as brute criminality. It's as if you can either be Mother Theresa or Al Capone. You can sacrifice yourself for the sake of others, or you can sacrifice others to yourself. But where is the room in this philosophy for a Thomas Edison or a George Westinghouse or a Steve Jobs, for men who built their fortunes through the creation of new ideas and products?

Ayn Rand learned the actual moral lesson of the history of capitalism. Moralists had warned that individuals driven by "greed" and left free to pursue their self-interest would plunge society into a system of brutality, plunder, and exploitation. Instead, capitalism produced a system of freedom, independence, prosperity, and super-abundant creative energy.

By contrast, Ayn Rand was born in Russia, and as a young woman she witnessed the Communist takeover in the 1920s, before she escaped to America. So she knew what happened when a society became thoroughly, consistently dedicated to self-sacrifice, to the sacrifice of the individual to the collective. So she knew that this was the real system of brutality and exploitation.

She experienced the contrast between the Soviet system and the American system, and she sought to defend the American system by explaining the morality of self-interest. She developed a new theory of morality in which the individual's central moral goal is the pursuit of his own happiness through productive achievement. She wrote:

"For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors—between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it."

That's what Ayn Rand came to say, and that's what she dramatized in Atlas Shrugged. And it's the moral lesson the political right needs to learn to save us from disaster.

For example, why did John McCain lose the last election? I can point you to the decisive moment at which the polls shifted against him. That was in mid-September of last year, when the financial crisis hit and Barack Obama began talking about how the crisis was caused by greed and self-interest and unregulated capitalism. McCain responded by saying that he, too, had warned against corporate greed and he, too, would impose new regulations to make sure that businessmen were forced to serve the public interest.

This was the old Republican politics of "me too," where the Democrats propose some socialist goal, and the Republicans come along and say "me, too, but just maybe not so fast and maybe not so big." And they always end up losing. But what I want to point out is that this begins as philosophical me-tooing. The Democrats say self-interest is evil and it's the source of all our problems, and so the government has to go around enforcing "shared sacrifice"—and the Republicans have usually said, "me, too." And in doing so, they have ceded the moral high ground to the left.

We need to take back that moral high ground, and Ayn Rand gives us the philosophical ammunition to do it.

One of the things I have liked about the recent "tea party" protests is that most of them did not invite politicians as their headline speakers. I like that because our established politicians are the cause of the current crisis. But I also like it because I think this movement should be about more than politics. We should think of ourselves as a moral reform movement. We're like the temperance movement, except that we're out to sober up politicians who have become drunk on government power and addicted to taxpayer money.

But to become a really effective moral reform movement, the tea parties need a philosophical hostess, if you will. Previous attempts to rein in government have failed because no one really challenged the moral presumption against self-interest, and no one challenged the idea that the sacrifice of the individual is some kind of moral ideal. In politics, if we're going to enforce respect for the freedom of the individual, then in morality, we need to respect the interests of the individual. That is why we need to understand and take seriously Ayn Rand's basic moral argument in favor of self-interest and against sacrifice.

If you read Atlas Shrugged, as I hope you will, please read it with that issue in mind, because that is her central message, and it's the idea that I think is crucially important for saving our liberty.

Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com.