Then the welfare, the relief, the compensation, instead of being nationally sponsored cash prizes for idleness and ineptitude, could go where the old independent uncompromising fathers themselves would have intended it and blessed it.
But the "right people" aren't (and won't be) running for office. Instead, we will continue to have "the average American legislator [who] is not only an ass," as Mencken wrote, "but also an oblique, sinister, depraved and knavish fellow."
The battle between Rand and Branden, moreover, is really no contest. Rand created something, whereas Branden has lived his entire life parasitically off Rand, first as a worshipful disciple and cult organizer, then as a neo-Randian shrink who set up shop in California with the solid initial base of the RandCult's Nathaniel Branden Institute mailing list.
There was just something too utilitarian and results oriented in Rand's purportedly principled case for IP, and something too artificial about the state's copyright and patent statutory classifications.
The mathematical economists are therefore framing assumptions which are admittedly false or partly false, but which they hope can serve as useful approximations, as they would in physics. The important thing is not to be intimidated by the mathematical trappings.
It comes down to the question of which is more fundamental to the Marxist worldview: its polylogism or its exploitation theory. A major job of the Hoppean project is to toss out the former while retaining a version of the latter in a way that can be used against the state and its interests.
But the mere desire to be free has never saved any people who did not know and establish the things on which freedom depends — and these are the things of religion.
