Fifty years ago this week, Ayn Rand published her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged. It’s an enduringly popular novel—all 1,168 pages of it—with some 150,000 new copies still sold each year in bookstores alone. And it’s always had a special appeal for people in business.

The reasons, at least on the surface, are obvious enough. Businessmen are favourite villains in popular media, routinely featured as polluters, crooks and murderers in network television dramas and first-run movies, not to mention novels.

By contrast, the heroes in Atlas Shrugged are businessmen—and women. Rand imbues them with heroic, larger-than-life stature in the Romantic mould, for their courage, integrity and ability to create wealth. They are not the exploiters but the exploited: victims of parasites and predators who want to wrap the producers in regulatory chains and expropriate their wealth.

Rand’s perspective is a welcome relief to people who more often see themselves portrayed as the bad guys, and so it is no wonder it has such enthusiastic fans in the upper echelons of business —not to mention thousands of others who pursue careers at every level in the private sector. Yet, the deeper reasons why the novel has proved so enduringly popular have to do with Rand’s moral defence of business and capitalism.

Rejecting the centuries-old, and still conventional, piety that production and trade are just “materialistic”, she eloquently portrayed the spiritual heart of wealth creation through the lives of the characters now well known to many millions of readers. Hank Rearden, the innovator resented and opposed by the others in his field, has not created a new type of music, like Mozart; rather, he struggled for 10 years to perfect a revolutionary metal alloy that he hoped would make him a great deal of money. Dagny Taggart is a gifted and courageous woman who leads a campaign to manage a transcontinental railroad and, against impossible odds, to build a new branch line critical for the survival of her corporation. Francisco d’Anconia, the enormously talented heir to an international copper company, poses as an idle, worthless playboy to cover up his secret operations—not to rescue people from the French Revolution, like the Scarlet Pimpernel—but to rescue industrialists from exploitation by ruthless Washington kleptocrats.

Economists have known for a long time that profits are an external measure of the value created by business enterprise. Rand portrayed the process of creating value from the inside, in the heroes’ vision and courage, their rational exuberance in meeting the challenges of production.