system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do people hate "Atlas Shrugged"?

I've never read the book myself, yet it seems to polarize many people. I have a general idea of what it's about, I can use Google and Wikipedia, but in general the idea of "every man keeps the fruit of his work" sounds pretty good to me. What's the problem with it?
gpt
Imagine you're at a party. Your friends are there, and all of your parents are there.

The adults sit down to play Monopoly. Your friend Johnny's parents start to win. Your friend Suzy's parents complain that they should get some free money from the bank because they're losing. 

Everyone laughs at Suzy's parents because they're being stupid. Everyone knows that in Monopoly what's important is that you follow the rules--that's what's fair.

Eventually your friend Johnny's parents win. 

Now the kids sit down to have a game. But Johnny's parents hand him all the property that they owned in the previous game. So he starts out owning everything.

Obviously, that's not a fair game--Johnny is going to win no matter what. 

But Johnny keeps insisting that it *is* a fair game, and that you're just being sore losers like Suzy's parents. He insists that all he wants to do is play by the rules like everyone else, and let the best player win. He somehow doesn't see--weirdly, it doesn't seem like he *can* see--that if you all play by the rules, he's going to win. Really, he's *already* won, before the game has started. 

Then Johnny gets even more annoying: he starts slowly *explaining why it's good to play by the rules,* like you're all idiots. What he's really doing is showing that he is too stupid to see how a game where one player starts off with a huge advantage is no game at all. But somehow, even though he's being very stupid, he's strangely smug about it.

So: The economy is like a Monopoly game. But it's been a long time since we all started out even (like the parents' game). Nowadays, many people start out *already having won,* and these people, like Johnny, insist that they just want to play by the rules like everyone else, and that if they *happen* to win, it's because they're better players.

And like Johnny, although these people are actually being very stupid, they're very smug. One reason they're so smug is a book called Atlas Shrugged, which gives many clever-sounding explanations for why it's good to play by the rules, until the simple fact that some people start the game already having won, while many others start out already having lost, gets clouded over.

So people either love or hate Atlas Shrugged: People who started out winning the game--who really *couldn't* lose--love a book that tells them that they win because they play better. Other people hate the book because they see that a) it's actually a very stupid book, and b) reading it makes coddled rich kids even more smug than they already were.