I enjoyed commenting on that thread. Thanks.
My posts are labeled "Alan L. Falk."

I feel a little dispossessed right now. Repossession would be welcomed ;)

We could get our favorite pirate to provide his ship for the cruise. He could "repossess" us.

OK, when it happens, K.

We're about an hour from Orlando. Very close to me is a very inexpensive, but enjoyable, zoo. We're also not far from the beach, the Space Center, and the cruise terminal. Perhaps it is time to organize a Gulcher cruise.

pictures!

I have family in Orlando. A detour could be arranged.

I don't know. try it

ah. best beef country.

I do not do Facebook and thereby cannot create an account. If someone wishes to post the following (which could be a response to several points, please feel free to do so.)

An example of typical government involvement in about anything.

The EPA was born and the first task it took on was to clean up the North Eastern Fishing companies. These companies after all were dumping the waste from fish process on a beach. This made the beach ugly and polluted the ocean.

You see there was a beach where virtually all the fish processing plants in the north east would put the waste from the fish (bones, guts...) and the seagulls would clean up the waste. It had been this way since colonial America before the revolutionary war. The EPA in its wisdom thought this bad, so they banned it.

The result was that land fill started to occur and the seagulls, no longer able to gain their own food as it had been given to them for over 100 years, started to drop dead in the hundreds and then thousands. The stench of the rotting corpses was linked to the businesses poor practices in waste disposal and the EPA saved the day with clean up crews.

At this point we have increased tax requirements twice, once to police the businesses so that the waste did not end up on the beach, and again to clean up the mess the change in law created.

Fast forward a decade where homes built on top of the waste landfill sites sank into sinkholes. Business was blamed and people began to sue the fish processing industry. Did government step up to fix the wrong they created with the policies they laid out? No, business was again made the bad guy. Result Fish processing plants and fishing companies alike began to close and did not renew the now very costly permits that paid for the government created costs to clean something up that had an excellent and natural process of disposing of the waste.

When few American companies would renew the fishing permits much of our fishing waters were licensed to Canadian companies and the north eastern fishing industry became an hard hit area of the economy.

you're welcome prof

Wow, that article was disjointed and difficult to get through. Ah, government is the solution to everything for these bots.

Where you are at is a long way from Florida, but should you be interested to come, the door will always be open to those who know how to unlock Galt's musical lock.

Interesting stuff. I am starting a small CNC machine shop in my garage. There a lot of room for break out in 3D metal printing. Hope we can meet someday.

"We have our work cut out and for the most self-interested reason: this is not the kind of world we want to live in."

exactly

That's my point exactly.

Life or The Universe, if you will, can neither be "fair" nor unfair. It simply IS. That people are born with different abilities is just a simple fact, and some will achieve more than others. Some, much more. So what?

The government can't "fix" that, nor should they. And any rhetoric about "leveling the playing field" or "making incomes more equal" is just that, meaningless political rhetoric.

And whenever they try, even with good intentions (a rather big assumption), they still only succeed in making people worse off.

Damn!
Got interrupted & never got back. Think it's too late?

I think you have defined very well the dilemma for those in the Gulch. Is shrugging the ultimate destruction? Isn't that why it took Dagny SO long to shrug?

All right, I forced myself to read her whole article. It made me feel as though I had just slogged my way through an uncleaned pig sty. Even the seemingly positive things she said about Rand were just damning with faint praise, a camouflage behind which to slip in the knife. Fortunately, several commenters did debunk her. Such a cesspool of illogic and deliberate obfuscation cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged, at Huff and anywhere else.

We have our work cut out and for the most self-interested reason: this is not the kind of world we want to live in.

This is the best post ever! Thank you, KH. The comments written by Gulchers after the article are so great, I've copied them into a file on my computer to peruse later for possible modification for my own use.

I hope Gulchers will do this kind of thing often for any articles that use Ayn Rand's name to get higher Google rankings. It might just help some people see the light.

well said! . that's why we have laws, I was thinking. -- j

The article is alot of nothing. The doesn't understand that we have a managed capitalist system with an immoral government. This is what is rendered in "Atlas Shrugged". It is sad to see this happening.