James Taggart

James "Jim" Taggart is the President of Taggart Transcontinental, Dagny Taggart's older brother, and the leading figure among the looters in Atlas Shrugged. He is the novel's most sustained psychological study, and the character through whom Ayn Rand argued that the destructive impulse is not a means to a selfish end but an end in itself.

The influence peddler

Jim holds the title while Dagny does the work, and he knows it. His competence is entirely political: he cannot judge a route, a rail or a contract, but he can read a room in Washington, and every advantage Taggart Transcontinental gains under his presidency is obtained by law rather than by service — the Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule that destroys a competitor, the directives that transfer other men's property to his balance sheet.

Rand uses him to concretise the rule of pull. In a mixed economy the return on political influence exceeds the return on production, so the men who rise are the ones best at influence, and Jim is what that selection process produces at the top of a great enterprise. See Statism, Antitrust and Exploitation.

His relationship with Dagny is the same structure inside one family. He opposes almost everything she does and depends on all of it, denounces the John Galt Line and claims its success, and cannot afford either to let her run the railroad or to let her stop.

Hatred of the good for being the good

The novel's deeper claim about Jim is that his motive is not greed. A greedy man wants something. Rand's diagnosis is that Jim wants the destruction of value as such, because the existence of value is the standing evidence of his own emptiness, and that everything else about him — the evasion, the borrowed opinions, the need for other people to agree — is machinery built to keep him from knowing it.

This is the disposition Rand called the hatred of the good for being the good. Its object is not the harm a good thing does but the fact that it is good; its psychological function is to remove the standard rather than to meet it. See Altruism and Sacrifice.

Cherryl Brooks, the shopgirl he marries, is the mechanism by which Rand exposes it. Jim marries her because she admires him, having mistaken him for the man behind Taggart Transcontinental, and the marriage is a way of possessing an admiration he knows is unearned. When she learns what he is and says so, the admiration is worthless to him, and what he wants from her afterwards is not correction but her destruction.

Project F

Jim's collapse comes at Project F, where he watches John Galt tortured. When the torture machine breaks and its operator cannot repair it, Jim orders it restarted, and in that moment he sees his own motive without any covering: he does not want Galt to yield, he wants Galt dead, and he wants it because Galt is what he is.

The recognition destroys him. What Rand stages there is the point her account of nihilism requires: the goal of the code Jim lives by is not existence on easier terms but non-existence, and a man who has pursued it consistently cannot survive identifying it. He is left catatonic.

Common misunderstandings

That Jim is a straightforward villain with selfish motives. Rand's whole construction of him denies this. A selfish man would want the railroad to prosper; Jim is unable to want anything of the kind, and the novel takes several hundred pages to show why.
That he is an argument against businessmen. He is an argument about how a man like him comes to run a railroad, and the answer the novel gives is a political one: he could not have, absent the power to obtain by law what he cannot obtain by trade.
That his dependence on Dagny is mere laziness. It is the sanction of the victim from the other side. His position exists only while she keeps supplying what he cannot. See Hank Rearden.
That Cherryl's fate is incidental. She is the novel's demonstration that Jim's disposition is lethal at close range, and her suicide is the last thing that happens before his own collapse begins.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "The Age of Envy", Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Meridian, 1999 — Rand's essay on the hatred of the good for being the good.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 9.