Dagny Taggert vs The Robber Barons, who are you putting your money on?

You say it has become fashionable to think of the lumber and railroad barons as crooks, like it’s something people do just to be stylish. I don’t know much about the lumber barons, but I have read quite a bit about the railroad barons, and they were certainly crooks, well it’s hard to say crooks because they sort of did it legally inasmuch as they bought the government officials who let them get away with it, but they were certainly bad men by the standards of those days and the standards of today.

Well it’s like anything where a lot of money is to be made, you have the nice honest guys who play by the rules, and you have the ruthless crooks who will do anything to pile up loot and stomp their competitors flat, and who are you going to put your money on?

I will grant you that they got things done. One of the things that has kept Chicago from being Detroit is its efficient mass transit system, and I believe almost all of that was built by crooks. But it’s not like the railroads wouldn’t have been built without those particular guys, if not them then the next guy who happened to be smarter and luckier and more ruthless, and if our government hadn’t been so easily bought, and we had fair laws, then they would have been built by those nice honest guys, and maybe with less corruption and mayhem.

And maybe built by nice honest guys like you libertarians, who have all these principles, and would set no value on a dishonest dollar. You know you guys are just like the communists. You set up this logical system, which on paper looks pretty good, pretty fair. But the commies assume that this system will be run by their altruistic new men, and you libertarians assume that Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon will be running yours. And in fact both will be run by the most ruthless who will stomp everybody else who isn’t as ruthless as them.

Oh I was just joking about us liberals driving our limousines out to see the buffalo roam. I thought you could tell when I spoke of us spreading brie on wafers, when of course we spread our brie on organic artisanal crackers. It would be nice though if we could scrunch that tier from Oklahoma to North Dakota and the evil triangle to the northwest into one state to make the distribution of senators fairer, and bring our socialist dream closer.

That thing about half the land being owned by the gov is a bit misleading. It is better phrased as the crappiest half of the land (the mountains, Alaska), the land that isn’t good for much, is owned by the government. This distortion is promulgated by the robber barons trying to promote the idea that there is all this land that they would love to develop and build little Cheboygans on because they love the American dream, and all they really want to do is rip out all the mineral wealth and leave the land poisoned.