[Sick of Lefties]

The rich are those who have made a lot of money. There are many ways to do that, especially in our system, and not all of them are crooked. Some are, few, I think. It’s the government route—the well traveled path of public servants—that troubles me the most. Just my predilection.

All people are flawed, rich and poor alike. We’re all sinners born with original sin. We all have our fights. Some fight better, or worse, than others, regardless of money. Wealth just accentuates the struggle, and draws attention to it. It doesn’t change the primordial fact; it just raises the stakes.

Ayn Rand saw one thing clearly: government compassion is tyranny. Thomas Aquinas anticipated her by a millennium: Justice without mercy is cruelty; mercy without justice is corruption.

She suspected, perhaps rightly, that at the root of government compassion lied the self-interested action of people seeking to instrumentalize collective power in order to line their pockets.

I never had much time for objectivism, or the notion of selfishness as a virtue. She didn’t understand the social nature of man.

She had grave kinks. That her passion scenes were bloody and violent seemed indicative to me. She referred to herself as “men like me.”

She was woman ahead of her times in ways I wish temporality had never caught up to.

With respect to learning, I’m always open to it. Quite often I have reason to thank others for their help.

All the best. Thanks for the praise.

[the invisib1e hand]

So, that leaves me wondering, was the remark about the rich not getting that way by stealing from others (I paraphrase from memory) -- which I believe is true in the large part but can by no means be accepted as unchanging truth -- simply shorthand, an incomplete thought, or did I miss something?

And surely you know I'm not nitpicking. I think it matters -- alot -- and for the reasons I stated.

Here's the irony of Rand, that I doubt you'll hear anywhere else: Marx argued that man's lower nature would doom capitalism to be overtaken by communism, with socialism as an interim stage on the path.

Rand espoused a vision of capitalism that barred the very virtues given us to master the lower nature. And her ideas were deeply revered by influential people, and more widely so than probably acknowledged.

She propagated the very form of secular capitalism that Marx said would doom capitalism to socialism, and then communism.

Rand had her day. And here we are.