Yes. What makes it worse is that what we do is evil so it has to be taxed. Somehow taxing something looters see as evil makes it all right.

I would like to live in a society where hatred of producers was considered destructive.

Jan

Me too. Sick of working to give it away to a looting government and looting people.

Mamaemma, human nature retains much of its evolutionary origins of animal behavior: unthinking pursuit of what survival needs and taking what one wants as one finds it. The notion of respecting others' property or even recognizing such a thing as ownership was a much later evolutionary stage. It made possible a system of communal living, with division of labor and productive achievement, voluntary cooperation, the trading of values for equal and mutual benefit, the recognition of individual rights. To get there we went through every variation of slavery, domination, exploitation, pillage and genocide through all the millennia of human expansion. (It is usually overlooked that America was able to have a "brilliant rocket-explosion" in its youth because it had a virtually virgin continent as a resource to appropriate.)

What we are seeing today is a long-coming relapse to wanting to have without the commensurate effort to earn it, a primitive motivation of envy. And because humans have developed the brain capacity for abstract reasoning coupled with unreasoning emotions, they have managed to construct thought systems that rationalize demanding that the productive serve the needy. And rather than gratitude, the productive are paid with the insolence of ever-growing demands, envy and accusations of greed. People can easily be led to believing that thus enslaving the more able is justified "for the greater good".

The evil resides in those who know how envy works and build it into a political philosophy that then enshrines itself into the culture as altruism enforced through socialism. You can see it nakedly exposed in a Bernie Sanders speech to congress that I came across recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsDYA...

There is growing talk of "war", first metaphorically as the war on drugs, the war against women, or against the middle class, or against the rich, or against the poor. But wars become real, and after making illegal wars against any number of foreign nations, we seem to be building towards civil war, what with militarized police and drones and ever-encroaching limits on citizens' rights. And will this civil war be people against people, or people against governmental tyranny? And how can we reverse this snowballing process to restore the enlightened system that built America, without a war, without bloodshed and destruction?

It always galls me when people speak of "the American experiment", as though it were just some transient thing to be tossed away instead of the breakthrough to the best great hope for a lasting civilization, a foundation upon which this strange product of evolution, the human species, could advance to greatness not yet dreamed of.

yes. There are places thirsting. it is brain drain, abaco. drain your country of your brain :)

What kind of engineering?

In my first non-fiction book I point out a number of changes in the laws from the late 90s that undercut technology startups. These same laws of course undercut the engineering profession. What is amazing is that so many engineers do not understand that their value is tied to the strength of the patent system for instance. Without strong property rights, engineers cannot work independently or start their own businesses. Manufacturers (including google and similar companies) are the new Luddites.

We sold cameras and accessories plus .We couldn't compete with big retailers in price, but we made so little on cameras that we only made profit on accessories. Our mantra was that if you didn't sell an accessory with a camera, you didn't really make a sale.

The smaller the state, the freer the people. Small nations cannot make big wars.

Esceptico is constantly trashing Ayn Rand with his own lack of understanding of what she wrote.

I wish that were true. But, if wishes were horses . . .

Thank you, K. CG, the fact that you could see this as nationalism shows how brain-washed you are. You are trying to see truth, but you have a lot to overcome.

She actually saw it happen in her youth.

+1