Ayn Rand musings

I have to say — and with all due respect to Sarah and her hubby — I used to be an unrepentant Objectivist.
When I was 18. A bit of water has passed under the bridge since then.
I’ve long since come to my senses. Rand believed in black and white — there was little grey in any of her writings. You were either good (Dagny) or bad (her brother, whose name escapes me). The grey characters like Dagny’s assistant (Eddie?) were put there primarily to point up how wonderful the good characters were and how bad the bad characters were. Even someone like Francisco who appeared on the surface to be a ne’er do well playboy ended up being one of the perfect people.
In Rand’s world, capitalism and freedom from government were good — and any attempt by the government to regulate anything was bad. The problem is, in any society of human beings, some regulation is always going to be necessary. The reason is that human beings simply aren’t perfect.
Galt’s Gulch is a trap, and it’s also the ultimate in escapism. It is perfection in a world where perfection is an ideal to be striven for, unlikely ever to be reached. And it’s a cold-hearted statement that the world is too fucked up for the perfect people to fix, so they’re going to simply go on strike until the old order collapses — no matter how much suffering goes on in the world until they deign to come down from Sinai with a new set of perfectly logical commandments.
I’d much rather toss Rand and Galt out on their heads and concentrate on today’s problems as WE see them.