Through much of AS, Dagny opposes the destroyer. She isn't ready to give up on American society yet. It makes sense because she built a segment of American society. She's pained to see it looted away and then decay in mismanagement by the looters.

It doesn't seem believable to me how quickly some of the producers seem to give up in the face of gov't meddling. You'd think they'd use the same acumen with which they deal with investors, customers, employees, and vendors, to explain to the politicians and the people they supposedly represent that their policies were tantamount to looting.

Eventually all the main characters give up on society in favor of the Gulch. It almost reads like the flood myth which crops up all around the world: People become decadent. The world is destroyed except for a few righteous people. This paves the way for a new and better world.

Some of the flood myth stories are probably related, but I also suspect that humans are adapted to be drawn to stories of an apocalypse cleansing away the evils of the world.

I am where Dagny is in the middle of the book (except I'm not a business genius), not even close to ready to give up. Like so many important causes, people tend to promote it by saying things are going to the devil. You don't hear arguments like “Domestic violence is way down thanks to the hard work of many people. Until it's zero, though, we still need help reducing it further.” Instead they tend to find some statistics that make it feel like domestic violence is an epidemic.

Liberty is more fundamental than something like domestic violence, but it plays out the same way. If you say things are good and need to get better, people see that as denying the issue.

The Gulch website members are like the Gulch members in the book. At one point they were focused on making things happen in the world-- selling management or investors on risky projects with huge potential, getting people on the same page, serving clients, building their “brand” as it were. They're tired of fighting to make projects work and fighting politics at the same time. Website members are probably still out there making stuff happen, but they long for a Gulch where they can do it without all the baloney.

“Why don't people talk about all the cool stuff they're working on instead of how bad the legal / regulatory environment is?” I wonder. The answer is obvious: This website is called the “Gulch”, not “Producers saving the looters' world.”

I love the idea of a Gulch. I love Seasteads and startup incubators on ships. There is loads of science fiction about people moving to space and breaking away as the US did. I love Thomas Jefferson's hope that America would have people in different places experimenting with vastly different rule systems. If the destroyer came for my wife (her business is succeeding at the moment) and our family, however, there's is NO WAY we'd go to the Gulch. We would never leave all our friends and family and everything we've built here. Escaping on plane out of Truax and watching the Capitol dome and surrounding Isthmus go dark like Dagny is a nightmare, not something I could see anything good in.

I plan to stop using this website in a few days. People here think I'm at best a Pollyanna and at worst someone whose tiny lobbying efforts (e.g. keeping HSAs allowed under PPACA) paradoxically help the looters by postponing the apocalypse. This is a pivotal time, an automation revolution I think, and we need all producers making defending liberty a primary avocation. I'm far from quitting. The Gulch is not for me.