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June 03, 2009

PRECIENT

One of my great pleasures of blogging is knowing that there are a few of you out there who read Atlas Shrugged because of me. For those of you who haven't gotten around to it yet (and there's one in particular, and you know who you are...ahem), may you find your motivation here: Randâ€™s Atlas Is Shrugging With a Growing Load

The hard-money monologue of Randâ€™s copper king, Francisco dâ€™Anconia, used to sound weird. Who even thought about gold in the early 1990s? Now, Dâ€™Anconiaâ€™s lecture on the unreliable dollar sounds like it could have been scripted by Zhou Xiaochuan, or some other furious Chinese central banker:

â€œPaper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, â€˜Account overdrawn.â€™â€

Posted by: Sarah at 11:30 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 I'm not sure if you mean me, but that damn book calls my name an awful lot. I have it on audible.com and on paper. And yet still....

Posted by: wifeunit at June 03, 2009 07:41 PM (t5K2U)

I like Amity Shlaes a lot, but when she refers to railroads as:

"an industry that is, today, almost irrelevant to the U.S. economy"

she is entirely wrong.

Without the freight railroads, the economy would be crippled, and within a few months people would actually be starving.

Posted by: david foster at June 04, 2009 11:54 AM (SpkYG)

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There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.
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June 03, 2009

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