Against Gulching
It does not matter that the Chilean farmer whose grapes are on your table has a religious icon in his home. If you cut yourself off from him - and the global commercial network - you only have the grapes you grow yourself... if you grow grapes, rather than apricots, kiwi fruit, watermelon, coconuts, ...
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which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread—a man of justice."
I'm fascinated by intentional communities, including "gulches". As a practical matter, for them to work they must be open to trade. I think they will appear in some form, they will be open to trade, and they will be a good thing.
They also cannot depend on the flood-myth collapse-of-civilization fantasy. When I read the part about the lights going out as the plane flew away, I took it as a cautionary worst-case scenario. It especially makes no sense at a time in history when the concept of respecting people's rights is doing better than historical norms.
As you say, it is unfortunate that some fans of Ayn Rand and full-on Objectivists condemn the entire list of billionaires.
You point out that Mark Cuban is Objectivist, but he supported Hillary Clinton for president. Clinton was far-and-away the best choice in my Ayn-Rand-fan view, assuming Gov Gary Johnson had no chance. In my view, rational choice was so overwhelmingly Clinton that I didn't give Trump any consideration. In general Republicans seems more detached from reality, more attached to politics. President-elect Trump isn't like other Republicans; I think he's even worse. It's hard to convey how highly I esteem Clinton over Trump.
I'm not sure what your point is, Mike. You rattle on about the heroes withdrawing their moral sanction from their destroyers, then go into some supposedly substantiated statements about how objectivism is incompatible with religion, a completely absurd tenet.
Rand's argument with religion was not based on the elements of reason that are entwined within it (she has said Aquinas, along with Aristotle and herself, were the only three philosophers worthy of note). She didn't care for how some aspects of religion regarded humans as low forms of life, and she didn't like the mysticism inherent in it. Remember she was Russian; there are definite forms of mysticism in the Russian psyche.
Her "objective" was to exalt man, not to deride him, as I've said some aspects of religion tend to do. And she used man's ability to reason as a "reason" for his exaltation.
(One cannot read Ayn Rand and hope to understand her philosophy without considering that she was Russian, was exposed to Russian thought and character, and Russian learning.) Have you ever read "The Russian Radical" by Chris Matthew Sciabarra? Although I have many disagreements with some of what he posits, he was very right about her "Russianism."
He said he believed she actually was not against dialectics, but he is completely wrong about that.
Can an objectivist make a free-market exchange with a group organized via socialism? It seems to me that the important thing is that it be a free choice and not what the motivating force of the trading partner is.
The isolation of the Gulch may have been to keep the government from coming in to make sure they pay their "fair share", and follow rules for the "safety of the children".
Rand wrote her novels so that her philosophy would be reachable by everyone, the "common man" as well as so-called philosophers; although she has said writing was her first passion, and that her philosophy provided only the framework for her fiction. The "ideal" man or woman of which she wrote is a classical Greek philosophical character. She may not have realized that writing HAD to be her passion. How else could she promulgate her philosophy? You know how interested she was in film making as well. Another means of promoting rationality to all.