Don't need any slack cut for me, thanks, and wasn't defending Nietszche's ideas by any means, but I don't mistake the man with the mind. The fact that he was physically weak and sickly has nothing to do with the philosophical stance he took: an atheist who followed the ramifications of such an anti-belief in toto, all the way. Of course nihilism is the result, but he didn't shrink from it. And I stand by the central claim: Rand repackaged the raw material of Nietszche's ideas and shaped them into something slick and smooth and easily swallowed by those whose vanity is tickled by the notion that they, too, are Reardon and Galt material. Whether or not 'Reardon Steel' belonged to Reardon is not the central issue of 'Atlas Shrugged', and in the real world, which we common folk somehow muddle through without Rand's quasi-divine arbitration, copyright and patent laws are in place to assure ownership belongs to the creator. The author's contempt for those not part of her self-styled elite is palpable. She spends several interminable pages, for example, explaining why the death of hundreds of people in a railway disaster really isn't such a bad thing since the train crash victims were idealogical bedfellows to the cardboard cutout bad guys in her novel. Conservative thought, as Hobbes and Locke propounded it, is based upon self-interest harnessed to a common good, the polity as a whole. The self-interest Rand advocates is pathologically extreme: selfishness not as a recognized trait of a less-than-ideal humanity, as Hobbes saw it, but as a virtue to be extolled and celebrated.
'Reformed lib' doesn't get in the way of anything. It does, however, give me some experience with power-hungry, self-styled apostles of truth.
In your opinion, has the asbestos lawsuits and government intervention ever lead to the death of thousands? Could that industry of parasites be comparable to the hundreds of deaths being portrayed in the railway disaster?