Directive 10-289 ends economic and personal freedom in the United States. The government now controls every aspect of an individual’s economic life; it is a dictatorship. The best minds, including Dagny’s, can’t tolerate this change and choose to retreat.
But while the directive itself has an astounding impact, the most important event of this chapter is the steadily increasing liberation of Hank Rearden from the looters’ moral code. Rearden has finally realized that he follows the code of life.
People such as Lillian, James Taggart, Wesley Mouch, and all the other looters can’t survive on their own, and the purpose of the current government policies is to ensure that creative, productive people can’t survive either. If Rearden’s is the code of life, the government’s is the code of death.
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