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I know two people who escaped from Cuba and came to the USA due to the hardships of Castro’s utopia. They said that goods were rationed by the government, but people would trade among themselves to get items they really wanted more. They had to avoid getting caught by the block captain, of course. I had not thought about how you would restart an economy.

.Ragnar’s gold is intended to restart the world after the final collapse. If a recession morphs into a depression and then morphs further into a disintegration, how would a nation’s economy – or the world economy – restart? Are precious metals, or some form of hard currency, the only solution? Would yet another fiat currency, such as the Amero or Globo, do the job?

Hard money or fiat money is not a sufficient, or IMO, even a necessary, condition to restart an economy. Emphasis on "RESTART".

Something must come before "money". Wealth. As my old econ prof would say, there are only three ways to create wealth; Agriculture, Mining and Manufacturing. So if that is true, and I think it is, then production has to start up first by the people themselves. Which gets me to what I have always found troubling in AR solution to world wide collectivism. Going Galt by destroying the productive capacity is like killing the host to rid it of the parasite. In fact, Ragnar, in shelling the plant, is the perfect metaphor for what I mean. That act, and others like them, is a respite to return society to the dark ages.

So what is my point? Something else is going on in Rand's soul. Some deep hatred for the society she came out of maybe. She herself seems to be the paramount destroyer. I haven't thought this through completely but this Book Club has got me thinking about this in a way I didn't when I first read it. And our contemporary problems also have focused my mind on practical solutions that will not in the end destroy us as a civilization.

You guys are making me think. A hard task indeed!