The only non-fiction Rand I've read was parts of VoS. This makes me want to read it cover-to-cover, as I did AS and Fountainhead. When I read this I thought, "of course the state must have a monopoly of use of force", but then I thought why is that true? I need to learn more theory about this.

You quote Ragnar saying, "I am giving them what they ask for." I would have told him to please stop doing that.

It occurs to me that this is the point of the book. Dagny was determined to ignore the politics and just get things done. Ragnar was at the other end of the radicalization spectrum. Maybe Dagny and Ragnar could have talked about this topic, but it would have been academic if the gov't had been less intrusive. They started using force, which necessitatest the discussion "how doe we deal with a group initiating force.".

Agreed, tu quoque is fallacious. And even the self-defense argument is weak. Defending your self (and property) in the moment is warranted. But after the fact? In the VOS, The Nature of Government, she talks about "renouncing the use of physical self-defense, for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement." In other words, it is unacceptable to have a bunch of violent vigilantes running around exercising vengeance, or their own imperfect view of self-defense justice. Let the police and the courts work it out according to objective law. But ultimately, in the absence of that objective law, Ragnar had to work it out on his own.

In P3C2, Ragnar admits that Galt and Akston disagree with his approach because it was too risky, though Galt said that Ragnar was morally justified. I suspect that even Ayn Rand was torn on this point, and not necessarily holding Ragnar up as an example for others to emulate. I think it was more about her using Ragnar to make a literary point, just another way to highlight the absurd logical conclusion of the Code of Death. As Ragnar says in this same conversation: "I am merely complying with the system which my fellow men have established. If they believe that force is the proper means to deal with one another, I am giving them what they ask for."

[Edited to remove a link that didn't work.]

I understood the part about violent resistance, and the need to resist however he can. He's executing the Declaration of Independence, trying to fight a long train of abuses.

"They believe in the use of force to take what they want? He used force and the mind, and did it better."
This seems like the tu quoque argument. To me he came off this way, as a thief using tu quoque has his rationalization. Conscious1982 had a good point, though, that maybe stealing from the "poor" meant those specific people behind the theft, not just people with low wealth or income. In this case, he's using force in self-defense.

"The "thieving poor" were powerful people that had not earned anything"
I like this interpretation.

Hi NSN,
I thought this chapter was a great summary of the book. The train serves as a powerful metaphor for all the types of looters & moochers in the world.

And some of the crew mentioned provide a nice catalog of the type of "producers" that are not business owners or entrepreneurs, but still have the proper and reasonable values.

Fair enough. Remember that he is not targeting all the poor, not the poor just because they are poor. He is targeting the poor who are moochers, especially the looters they vote in who forcefully take from the producers. Legal plunder is still plunder, and Ragnar sees it as warrant for violent resistance, probably justified as self-defense. It may be a stretch, but I see where he is coming from. In part 3, he acknowledges that his way of joining the Strike is controversial, not everyone will agree. But he saw it as a giant reductio ad absurdum in action. They believe in the use of force to take what they want? He used force and the mind, and did it better.

The "thieving poor" were powerful people that had not earned anything.

You found Ragnar contemptible for taking back that which the 'entitled poor' had stolen from producers? How consistent, to the theme of the novel, is the idea that one of the heroes is a thief that rationalizes he's a good guy while targeting poor people? Could you be missing something?

I found Danneskjöld a contemptible character. The gov't was starting to steal wholesale. That does not justify Danneskjöld's stealing. It's esp low that he mentions targeting the poor. We saw the gov't central planners making deals to move food from the midwest or oil from Colorado for political reasons, making their friends rich and making most citizens' poor. So clearly it's not as simple as all the poor in the story got their stuff by stealing and the rich got their wealth honestly. Most thieves, though, have a rationalized story of how they're actaully the good guys.

“The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 16, was a humanitarian who had said, ‘The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent. Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the needy is concerned.”

“The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 15, was an heir who had inherited his fortune, and who had kept repeating, ‘Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?’”

“The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind – how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous? – no reality – how can you prove that the tunnel exists? – no logic – why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power? – no principles – why should you be bound by the law of cause-and-effect? – no rights – why shouldn’t you attach men to their jobs by force? – no morality – what’s moral about running a railroad? – no absolutes – what difference does it make to you whether you live or die, anyway? He taught that we know nothing – why oppose the orders of your superiors? – that we can never be certain of anything – how do you know you’re right? – that we must act on the expediency of the moment – you don’t want to risk your job, do you?”

“The man in Bedroom F, Car No. 13, was a lawyer who had said, ‘Me? I’ll find a way to get along under any political system.’”

“The woman in roomette 9, Car No. 12, was a housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing, to control giant industries, of which she had no knowledge.”

“The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.”

“The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, ‘I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.’”

“The man in Roomette 2, Car No. 9, was a professor of economics who advocated the abolition of private property, explaining that intelligence plays no part in industrial production, that man’s mind is conditioned by material tools, that anybody can run a factory or a railroad and it’s only a matter of seizing the machinery.”

“The woman in Roomette 6, Car No. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had ‘a right’ to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.”

“The man in Seat 5, Car No. 7, was a worker who believed that he had ‘a right’ to a job, whether his employer wanted him or not.”

“The man in Drawing Room A, Car No. 6, was a financier who had made a fortune by buying ‘frozen’ railroad bonds and getting his friends in Washington to ‘defreeze’ them”

“The man in Bedroom H, Car No. 5, was a businessman who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan, under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.”

“The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and to murder one another – and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rulers, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice.”

“The woman in Roomette 10, Car No. 3, was an elderly school teacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing.”

“The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion ‘for a good cause,’ who believed that he had the right to unleash physical force upon others – to wreck lives, throttle ambitions, strangle desires, violate convictions, to imprison, to despoil, to murder – for the sake of whatever he chose to consider as his own idea of ‘a good cause,’ which did not even have to be an idea, since he had never defined what he regarded as the good, but had merely stated that he went by ‘a feeling’ – a feeling unrestrained by any knowledge, since he considered emotion superior to knowledge and relied solely on his own ‘good intentions’ and on the power of a gun.”

“The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it’s masses that count, not men.”

“Bill Brent knew nothing about epistemology; but he knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it – and that there is no other way for him to live.”