Or even better, you can send Bill Gates over there so he can lecture them personally “Listen fellas, you can get rich like I did in America by following the rules like I did! Now, lets roll up our sleeves and get to work!”

You are the one who needs a Hubble telescope, because you refuse to see, or admit to yourself, that this is what businessmen do, what they will always do, unless they are REGULATED. Greed and power is in their makeup, it is in their blood, like syphillis. It is who they are and what they do and the system they operate in selects for it and concentrates it. What you see in Russia and China is where Capitalism inevitably goes when it is not controlled and managed by a free people with constitutional institutions. Free market paradises don’t evolve naturally, they are built politically, and they are resisted most vigorously by the free marketeers themselves.

Commercial free market competition will not keep businesses in line any more than it keeps rival gangsters in line. These people don’t become criminals because someone puts a gun to their heads, they do it naturally, because its in their nature, and because someone never put a gun to their heads and forced them to play by the rules. Its happening in Russia and China and it happened years ago throughout most of Latin America and it will happen here if the Right Wing isn’t stopped.

Your “virtue arising naturally from the self-regulation of a free market” is a sham, it never has worked, it never will work, it can’t work. It may have seemed like it was working two hundred years ago because we had a rich, empty continent to expand into, but even then it was propped up by slaves, muskets, and the violent expropriation of land from those who actually lived on it.

These people don’t care about your rules and principles or your quaint 18th century mythology. They didn’t care about it in antiquity, or the age of Mercantilism, they didn’t care about it in the Gilded Age, they aren’t going to care about it here and now if the Republican Party gets its way.

Tom, you’re a Fabian, a boy scout. You talk about the glories of a system that doesn’t exist, and never existed, and in the one place and time in the world where it came the closest to existing, you work feverishly to undermine it.

Jim Taggart in “Atlas Shrugged” bragged to Dagny about how he was bringing more cash in through government fiat than she’d ever earned by private trade. As long as you think there’s no difference between a thug accumulating wealth through the power of government guns and Bill Gates selling a product, you’re never going to get it.

What we think don’t mean shit. We simply do not matter. They are the ones who have earned the right to pontificate by actually running profitable businesses, and that is all that counts in that experimental protocol.

What we do here is what Richard Feynmann used to call “filozawfigal speculation”.

Hmmm. Maybe history does repeat itself; first as tragedy, then as farce.

I have absolutely no doubt that a huge number of Americans would adapt quite well to a Soviet-style command state. After all, when you think about it, the vast majority of the people in such countries didn’t have all that much trouble avoiding the knocks on the door at night.

Do your job, don’t make waves, and go along to get along. If you play your cards right – in the realm of pull, not ability – maybe you can become one of the “nomenklatura.”

And of course, there’s always the vodka.

After a couple of generations, nobody will even remember what it used to be like when the living standards were twice as high.

The Eastern bloc fell because people could look across the barbed wire and see the truth. When the West goes down the same road, there’ll be nowhere left to look.

I once had a long talk with a Russian emigre who had worked for a Soviet research bureau. He was my colleague at a major US oil company development laboratory–essentially, the same kind of work. I asked him what the difference was between the two.

He thought about it for a while and answered, “this pays better, otherwise its about the same.”

Like in physics, the reality of industrial organization, the power hierarchies etc, are what dominate the human relationships and social structures, not the ideology.