When I was in high school, I grew enamored of the works of Ayn Rand. One sentence stayed with me: what the capitalists of the world lacked was "a moral sanction." She meant a philosophy which explicitly endorsed a mode of being, a coherent set of principles. She provided one. John Galt's long radio address laid out the Objectivist philosophy. It was written at a time when, in Rand's view, America was turning its back on its capitalist successes and embracing collectivism, especially that of the Soviets, which she had experienced firsthand, to the sorrow of her and her family. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957. Thirty years later, things had turned around, as in Gordon Gekko's speech in Wall Street in which he said, "Greed is good." Since then, we have seen capitalist excesses--oil industries that cause environmental crises, for instance--that make it hard to grant a pass to all who toil for profit. But more worrisome to me is the withdrawal of a