reason/sanity retweetet
Ayn Rand's most important lesson: Production comes before distribution. You cannot divide a pie nobody baked.
Every politician inverts that order. They argue over who gets what slice, how to tax the baker, how to redistribute the flour, as if the loaf simply materialized like manna. Rand called this out for what it is. Wealth is created by specific people doing specific things: Hank Rearden smelting metal, John Galt building a motor. Take those people away and you're left with committees drafting memos about fairness while the lights go dark.
The entrepreneur is not a parasite skimming off labor. He directs scarce resources toward their most urgent uses, and he eats the loss when he guesses wrong. No bureaucrat carries that risk. This is what Ludwig von Mises spent his career proving in denser prose.
Rand's villains aren't cartoon capitalists. They're the moochers who demand the moral sanction of their victims: the industrialist who lobbies for a subsidy, the intellectual who calls envy "social justice." She hated the crony as much as the commissar.
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