I don't. I have endured silly ISO business standard rituals because of crazy EU protectionists. The whole EU affair has failed to make sense for the past twenty years. You achieved the free trade end game and then... kept going? WTF. Nobody really cares about most of the stuff that the EU does these days aside from the narrow interest groups that benefit from it.

European countries already have figured out how to wipe their asses. Nobody needs another, very thick layer of nannies on top of what's already there and already working well enough.

And I greatly despise the "That Hideous Strength" style of embrace and extend tyranny that the EU engages in (that is, bribing elected politicians to betray their country's interests via cushy jobs with the resulting EU bureaucracy). As a result, I'm rooting for the whole thing to end in ignominy. So far so good.

You know, it would be nice if we all had societies and systems that were worthy of respect by everyone else. I feel that we're collectively letting ourselves down though things are better than what they've been in the past. Maybe as we did before, something better will come of it eventually.

America is not just the West. After all, there's a lot of people in America who know a lot about America, but very little about the rest of the West. If you look at Atlas Shrugged, it's quite clear that everything is deliberately vague beyond the borders of the US, which might be her ignorance of Europe and South America or that she was writing for a mostly US audience (who would not be familiar with those places either).

But even granting that, she had lived in the US for over a decade before the publication of Anthem, her first libertarian-style fiction and over three decades by the time of the publication of Atlas Shrugged.

And I'm sure, if I had parachuted into Mother Russia with instructions to undermine the regime with my knowledge of orgami, that would have been super-effective too.

You might find this hard to believe, but people who think they're born to rule, don't need a book to justify their world view. Rand was a bit crazy, particularly in her later years, but it's ridiculous to assert she was undermining democracy with words (actually it would be ridiculous to assert that she was even trying to - she does have a long pro-democracy history, let us note). It is impossible to do that just as it would be impossible to overwhelmhe USSR with a few small bits of folded paper.

What I believe happened here and why Rand was so influential was because she was a voice for groups and ideas which had long been neglected and derided. I speak not just of the imaginary people who supposedly thought they were born to rule, but somehow couldn't avail themselves of the multitude of utopian, authoritarian belief systems tailored to them, but also the people who grew tired of the ever increasing dysfunctionality, demands, and hypocrisy placed on them by society and authority.

And seriously, how is Rand supposed to have undermined democracy anyway? I note that we in the US currently have a president who is the antithesis of anything Rand believed in, who is casually slipping the US into another Vietnam-style war in Iraq, created the most destructive social program (the Obamacare thing) in forty years, has a variety of 0-9 losses at the Supreme Court from breathtakingly irrational, unconstitutional actions and arguments (typical looter logic in Atlas Shrug but without the compliant judicial branch to make it work), and a variety of creeping acts of tyranny.

Meanwhile we have a senator, named after Ayn Rand herself, who just opposed renewal of the Patriot Act, which is probably the single biggest step toward US tyranny in the last half century, by filibustering it at a crucial period prior to its renewal.

I suspect you might not have a clue what undermining a democracy entails. It's not words that undermine a democracy, but the crushing of freedom to act, to speak, to think, which undermines democracy.

10-20. It's probably TMI, but I have more than that in my gut right now.

It's probably circular logic, like the guy hurt himself by getting busted.

So what? I don't expect everything to last forever. Read something else and move on. If the WSJ lost a bunch of readership, then it wouldn't matter that it has slid so much.

Well, that and their ability to regenerate crime sprees on the fly. I've seen a number of such stations which don't go beyond reading the local crime blotter and cute pet stories.

Which is a remarkably underwhelming number.

But that is a considerable part of the reason we don't normally consider gold to be a pollutant. Dose makes the poison and there just isn't a lot of dose here.

LOL. That's a lot of unintentional comedy right there, 7300 plates worth. I guess the California government is good for something.

Well, I've been READing and UNDERSTANDing you and I have yet to see an actual fact backing your assertion that the tax is regressive. If we actually look at the proposed mechanics of the tax, it's a a flat tax on everything past a certain base amount. That right there makes it slightly progressive. And that's pretty much it.

It doesn't help that so many of Rand Paul's opposition are twirling their well-oiled mustaches like a Ayn Rand cartoonish villain.If you're a plug in replacement for a "looter" in Atlas Shrugged, then Ayn Rand's stilted writing and logic is the least of your troubles.

Except by taking their stuff or putting people in jail, of course. The thing missing in your argument is the vast power differential between even a "weak, decentralized" government and a corporation.

Sure, it does. A business's power is far easier to break. Just destroy or take their capital or stop buying their stuff, then they stop making a profit. That jackboot goes away when the business can no longer pay for it. For better or worse a small group of people can considerably harm even a large business, if they target it with effective sabotage or high profile bad publicity.

Sure, they do. But over the lifespan of the US the "moderation" usually favors the wealthy and connected. It's only when the public gets particularly outraged that the moderation has anything to do with creating a better society.

The obvious rebuttal is twofold. First, one would expect in a democracy for those who don't desire government action in their lives to require a larger bribe than those who do. It's standard supply and demand in a democracy.

Second, where is the money going? Just because, say, West Virginia gets money for a high tech emergency command center or money to back bonds for an interstate (hypothetical examples) doesn't mean that the money goes to West Virginia networking equipment manufacturers or the fees for managing the sale of said bonds go to West Virginia brokers. There's a lot of blue state participation in red state spending.

I call your bluff here. By all means, cut funding to those disrespectful, slothful red states. Of course, your "moderation of society" will be cut in retaliation. That's win-win for me.

I think the previous poster was thinking of stuff like the "nuclear option", the blocking of filibustering (like what Paul did just now) on a variety of US Senate activities. That wasn't done by the "right wing" though admittedly they were blamed for it.

Except for the obvious bit about not actually being regressive. The actual regressive tax problem I see with a flat tax is that they can't permanently eliminate tax loophole creation. That's what creates localized regressive tax situations today.