Atlas Shrugged

The Objectivist Perspective of Morality considers productivity and the accumulation of value via money for one’s own satisfaction to be the height of virtue. To an objectivist, material wealth is an important indicator of moral worth. Rand uses the recurring symbol of the dollar sign to reinforce this principle and to indicate which characters have adopted the objectivist system of morality.

This symbol has been adopted by the men of Galt’s Gulch to represent their society and their values. A large golden dollar sign hangs over the valley itself and is stamped on the cigarettes, which first clues Dagny in on the existence of their community. As workers abandon their posts and disappear in the final, turbulent days of the looters’ society, many of them leave behind dollar signs to indicate their support for Galt’s principles. When Dagny herself leaves Taggart Transcontinental to rescue and join Galt, her final farewell is a dollar sign drawn in lipstick on the plinth of Nat Taggart’s statue.

In the final line of the novel, Galt “trace[s] in space the sign of the dollar” over the world beyond their valley (1168). This symbolizes the power that he holds, reinforces his role as a prophet for objectivist values, and alludes to the fact that they now plan to roll out their model of an objectivist utopia across the whole country.