That may be true. It is not how I meant it. Perhaps I am showing naivete?

Undoubtedly.

The real purpose of statism is to protect and feed the politically connected. I bet the party people had access to imported toilet paper !!

It seems the word urban has been hijacked to mean black now, at least in las vegad

Well said.

Like Neal Boortz, the former talk radio host, I prefer to call "homeless" people ... urban outdoorsmen.

I went to East Berlin for one day in 1984. The propaganda on building walls was everywhere ... and yet you had to pay a bathroom attendant / spy for access to toilet paper ... that was as coarse as the worst paper towel you have ever used on your hands. I knew that I loved America back then, but didn't know how much until I realized that I was born into the best 1% of situations I could have been born into.

The reality that so many refuse to admit is the inherent similarity and origination of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the deserts of the Mid-East and the evils practiced by all three, as well as numerous other religions. The problem we face is not the religion, it is the stupidity of men that take direction from magical supernatural beings supposedly inviting us to live beyond our individual mortality if we will just do as we are instructed by those other, special humans that can understand and interpret the words of other special humans that the magical beings spoke to and on and on. What nonsense.

We are here, and we are now, and I for one am an Individual with the rights of my existence and nature. All religions are anti-life in that they all seem to promise something beyond the glimmer of our life and our existence as we're able to know it. None are better or worse than any other. They are all morally wrong considered against the life of men. Only reason can defeat the evil or protect us from it.

Indeed.

I never really understood what communism was. I thought originally it was a system where everyone was fat dumb and happy in communes. When Russia collapsed I saw it was a system geared for the party members to live like kings while the peasants just survived.

its open source, feel free to make however many you want. I hope a LOT of them get made. I am getting some cool artwork done now. Feeding the homeless is really a stupid thing to do. They just come back tomorrow, and the next day, etc and never get their lives together.

She'd be sick to her stomach...I also suspect our Founders would already be up in arms and leading the rebellion.

Great idea i might just go to a custom web site and have it made also. but the originator should sell rthem on his own site. love the commentary you folks are really good thinkers
I just wish the American public would wake up to the fire in their own house that the liberals are labling just another friendly barbecue. (unfortunately its our own house that is going up in flames, the burning up of all the American ideals and dreams)

What I don't see is the ability of the Gulchers to affirm a philosophical basis for their rejection of the creeping totalitarianism. They sense it as impinging on their love of freedom but don't seem to be coherent in their objections. Philosophical understanding requires intellectual work and opinions are lazy. So there is little indication that all the chatter here represents any potential for change.

Well, just don't forget one thing, that all too many libertarians forget. External enemies do exist. Muhammad declared war against every founding element of the United States before the United States was even a glimmer in anyone's eye. Like it or not, we inherit, in the Muslim mind, the despised position of the Byzantine Empire.

Actually, Ayn Rand already had lived in Switzerland briefly with her family before returning to Russia. She came to America for the movies, something else that was not invented in Switzerland.

A culture of entrepreneurship is not just about a lack of regulation. it is not even the legal framework of private property, though that is important. Hernando de Soto Polar made the point well in The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumph in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. Dale Halling has been saying the same things here. But necessary is not sufficient.

I have been to Switzerland. Nice place. No life. Ordered. Regular. Predictable. Why do you think that the computer revolution did not begin there?

It is a problem that we advocates of capitalism have not solved. If laissez faire is just about the laws, why did capitalism blossom here in the first place? Telegraph, telephone, television, Internet... they did not come from the Cayman Islands or even from Hong Kong. Those places may be more "business friendly" but they lack something that we have. Even if we gave it a label, it might still remain ineffable.

Your glib statement is an array of glittering generalities. "Most of the entrepreneurs" would be millions of people. How many do you know?

I grant that you do know about Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and of course Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and a few others. I grant also that Google executive Eric Schmidt is no fan of your freedom: he is explicit about that.

On the other hand, T. J. Rodgers does not get the celebrity notice, though he does make his opinions known. He is not alone in that. Ed Snider was a serious promoter of Ayn Rand's ideas. Moreover, his story about Atlas Shrugged begins with Peter O'Malley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbPV6...

In The Invention of Enterprise, the editors and authors make the point that every society gets the entrepreneurs that it allows and encourages. In Rome, conquest brought glory. Successful businessmen bought farms, lived like landed optimates, and turned their enterprises over to freedmen and slaves. True laissez faire may be an unknown ideal, but you cannot condemn people for make the best lives they knew how. You might has well condemn them for not having cell phones.
(See my review here: http://libertarianpapers.org/article/...

The great age of railroading was interlaced with government initiatives. James J. Hill stands out. It is literally true that he sought no government favors. But the whole truth is that he benefited as a free rider on the grants and privileges given to others. Gould, Harriman, Fisk, Stanford,... Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, ... you can make heroes or villains out of any or all.

The story is then not them, but you. You are not alone in enjoying the bitter dregs of economic weltschmerz. It is a story that plays well here.

Adophe Menjou was one of my favorite actors in the fifties TV and replays of his films. Born in 1890, he was getting old and last performance was about 1961 and death from an infection in 1963. The socialist vane flowing through Hollywood did not seem to hurt his career, not like the blacklisting of leftists in the fifties actually killed the careers of many good actors and others.
Try imdb.com for a good biography.

No, I didn't forget AR's statement about the US's right to invade what she termed as outlaw states (those states that do not recognize the individual rights of man either within or without and utilize force in both areas). But she went on to describe FDR's justification of his 'four rights' to invade, Stalin's power and territorial gains, statism's gains within the US, and the US's following obligations to support both enemies and allies as complete individualism failures resulting from the actual liberal/progressive motivations for war and the associated lies that Americans bought off on through misguided patriotism and willful ignorance. The statist central planning technocrats of Wilson and FDR utilized the war to solidify their positions and justifications in the minds of the population, and gained permanence in both political parties and within the 'hidden gov't' of the bureaucracy.

No doubt that AR would deplore the "internal policies" that we now live under, but we mustn't forget the contributions to that condition obtained through continual intervention and wars and the continual barrage of the propaganda of external/internal fear and 'the good' of spreading democracy. We only fail ourselves if we refuse to recognize that all of the US policies, "internal and external" have the same ultimate goals of collectivism/statism and slavery to central planners

The individual rights of man, defended fiercely by each and every man is the sole means to liberty, life, and happiness--that should be the true Americanism.

tem2....Good idea. Please let me know when you do so I can BUY one. roneida

I am going to make a custom. T shirt. "Please don't feed the homeless"

Their lack of a rational philosophy is the reason. Like with Rand where the influence from a line or two in some works would turn some away from discovering rational works. Some of the many anti Rand sources that in a few sentence trash Rand are 'The Closing of the American Mind', 'The National Review', and 'The Lonely Crowd". You do not want a lot of discussion if you want to turn readers against someone. Say too much and thinking might start. At the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s it was that she was a naive realist: end of discussion,.

I think that she would cry. . and then, ferociously
attack the fascists and collectivists in charge. -- j
.