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.
I realize I’m twisting the metaphor, but who wouldn’t rather live in a literal desert as their own man than to live in a verdant paradise as the host organism for a looter? Besides, the paradise won’t last long anyway if looters are allowed to be in charge.
But this comment gets to the root of our disagreement:
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.
We will never know whether your statement would be true. But , first, given the level of physical destruction and decay described by Rand it would seem reasonable to think they where back to a pre-industrial condition.
And, second, without getting ahead of ourselves in the story, can we really be sure the hearts and minds of the people where changed? I gotta tell ya, what I know of human nature tells me that there will be a hell of a lot of pissed off people coming out of the ashes. But that's for a later thread!