“Rand left Eddie Willers to die”
What did you do to help him?
Just kidding of course. Leaving a fictional character to die is not a crime yet. A fictional account to make a point is not the same as killing someone. If it was, PETA would have gone after Disney for allowing Bambi’s mother to be shot.
Rand was definitely trying to make a point by killing off Eddie Willers.
And that point pretty much seems to be, "every man for himself, and no amount of loyalty and hard work is worthy of reciprocation."
Unlike (we are led to believe) every single person in Galt's Gulch, Eddie does not have the ability to fix a locomotive, and apparently that sort of thing is the standard by which a Rand character must live or die. In essence, Eddie Willers was no more than a tool of Taggart Transcontinental -- a mere employee, content and proud to be so, and disposable for that reason.
The underlying premise in Atlas Shrugged -- and by extension, Rand's overall philosophy -- is there are really only two types of people: titans of industry, and those who exist to serve them... and the latter cannot operate or even survive on their own without the presence and activity of the former. One is either a producer or a looter, and there is no middle ground.
Whittaker Chambers once noted that Rand's characters can be traced back to Nietzsche:
Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous Leftists are Nietzsche's "last men," both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria. And much else comes, consciously on not, from the same source.)
There is no middle ground for her.... unlike in the real world.