Adam Kirsch, in an a recent review of Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made, calls out Rand for failing to live up to the capitalist ideas she advocated in Atlas Shrugged. Rand wrote a lengthy speech at the end of the novel, in which the main character, John Galt, lists the virtues of capitalism. Bennett Cerf, the publisher at Random House, asked Rand to cut the speech, which she refused to do. According to Kirsh,

Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. … Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre.

In fact, I see this transaction as the ultimate expression of capitalism at work. Capitalism isn’t about maximizing profits; it’s about maximizing utility or, more colloquially, happiness. Rand decided that she wanted to express her ideas completely more than she wanted seven cents per copy in royalties. She bought the ability to express her ideas with her foregone royalties, thus making her better off than she would have been otherwise.