And your last point also is convincing PROVIDED the remaining employees where active accomplishes in the looting. Otherwise I still maintain that they would be like the poor salesman on the Comet killed when they mountain feel down. Just trying to get along in a FUBAR system. Is that a Capital Crime?
But your second point caused me to recall a statement by a Roman historian ( or was it Greek? ) that the Romans made a desert and called it peace. Your collateral damage argument made me wince.....and made me think that perhaps Galt made a desert and called it freedom.
“accomplishes” above....should be accomplices.
It makes me wince too. It's not an accident that I say "Those who defend the nuclear bombing of Japan...". I'm ambivalent about it in a way myself, yet it's probably beyond dispute that had that terrible decision not been made, tens or hundreds of thousands more Japanese and Americans would have died miserable deaths, so maybe the defenders are right.
And in the AS case, it's equally undeniable that the vast majority who survived lived a much better life after the crushing of the looters than they would have otherwise.
Sorry, I hit Post before finishing my thought about the desert thing. If your back yard is full of weeds and you want to grow a garden, you have to wipe it clean, in effect to create a desert first, in order to enable the valuable plants to grow, so desert-to-freedom is not entirely an unreasonable concept.
If you choose to live in a system where incompetence cause death and destruction, is your death the fault of the incompetents or of those who were unable to stop them?
The book has numerous references to the destructive effects of socialism. It also illustrates the efforts of people like Bertram Scudder and Floyd Ferris to deceive people about the nature of what is happening. Some, like Ellis Wyatt, abandon the effort. There are mentions of others who likewise remove themselves from the fray. It's one thing if you burn your business down and the people inside it die. It's something different if you leave your business to those who were trying to steal it, and they burn it down. That's what is happening in Atlas Shrugged. Discussions about semantics clouds the issue. Would more people die if you burned the business than if the looters promised free goods to everybody, filled the business with people, and then burned it down?
Responsibility lies with the person who lit the match.