Re-reading John Galt's speech.

"...When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.



The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics' Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay cheek was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden...."

For those unfamiliar with Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", Henry 'Hank' Rearden is one of the novel's protagonists- a maverick steel producer who declines the opportunity to have his work nationalized by 'moochers' who support the idea of the innovative being forced to share their wealth, whether ideas or hard assets, with the rest of the world. Yes, that is socialism.

We stand idly by, these days, watching nations such as China, lifting themselves from the pallor of third world status to a vibrant and healthy standard of living which draws admiration from many around this world. All the while we keep taking one step backward each day to allow yet another governmental regulatory body staffed by moochers exercise yet another facet of control over our own industries.

Ask yourself this: could we make enough steel armament to defend ourselves from an armed invasion of our shores? Well, could we?