[Myrddin]

If you have read "Atlas Shrugged", there is parallel going on here. Producers and looters. The producers are capable and productive. The looters are those who lack the ability to compete. The looters depend upon using corrupt politicians to give them advantage and insert obstacles in the path of the producers to handicap them. All the name of a "level playing field". It's not level. It's corruption. The original title of "Atlas Shrugged" was "The Strike". It was a strike of the productive. A rebellion against the politically imposed oppression. A full withdrawal of any manner of support that keeps the corruption functioning. The best and brightest...key players...just vanished. The organizations that relied upon them fell apart.

Observe carefully that the producer/looter paradigm is a general observation without attachment to any contemporary group. The actual players in the paradigm may change over time, but the principles are timeless. Feel free to attach relevance to the current day from your own experience.

[Regulator]

I’ve traveled extensively on business across the world.

I can tell you that seeing the wreckage of the Soviet Union is palpable verification of what Alisa Rosenbaum aka Ayn Rand was warning of.

70 years of holding back or outright murdering their Best and Brightest resulted in countries full of Europeans living in 2nd or 3rd world nightmares trapped in 1917 technologically.

They are only now coming out of it but the attitudes of state sponsored impediments to innovation and efficiency are still there in the older generation, and the endemic corruption that state run “enterprizes” generates is still rooted in many industries and hard to dislodge.

But what they see with their own lying eyes is a better life if they can overcome that crap and that is definitely happening, even in the center of the cesspool, which is Russia.

But as even the dimbulb Communists found out, you can’t fool all the people all the time. They see what everyone else has and they want it, and they will get it, no matter how many fat bumpkins pining for the good old days try to stand in their way.