Both Atlas-and I- Shrugged.

It all evens out; at least that's what I tell myself.

I read all 776,981,442 pages of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged about two years ago for the first time. It got me so fired up that I wanted to land my Taggart Transcontinental helicopter in Harvard Square, find the first Academic Socialist I could find (.09 seconds) and furiously debate them. The problem is-then and still sometimes now-I have a tendency to read other people's ideas and take them as my own.

Not smart.

It's hard sometimes to reconcile a system that pays gazillions to schmucks who do nothing more than move blocks of highly dubious financially engineered capital around while an exceptionally skilled critical care nurse might just get by. Spare me the bullshit that defends or rationalizes the above. I've heard it in 90 different flavors.

The problem, however, with any form of collectivism is it is managed by humans and we are prodigiously flawed. Any form of it has never worked and it never will. All collectivism has ever accomplished is the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of millions.

"..The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.." might be the most brilliant thing ever said about economic systems. Google its author. He said many smart things.

I won the lottery at birth but I don't have the stomach for this world sometimes.