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crooked-v • last Friday at 1:22 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

The beef is mainly that the book portrays Galt's Gulch as both a good thing and as something that would actually function, when the real world consequences of trying to run a society like that are that your town fills up with wild bears that destroy everything and eat your pets (https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...).

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piekvorst • last Friday at 3:58 AM

It is a good thing and it absolutely can function, but not as a society. Ayn Rand explicitly rejected this idea [1]:

    Q: Why is the lack of government in Galt’s Gulch (in Atlas Shrugged) any different from anarchy, which you object to?

    A: Galt’s Gulch is not a society; it’s a private estate. It’s owned by one man who carefully selected the people admitted. Even then, they had a judge as an arbitrator, if anything came up; only nothing came up among them, because they shared the same philosophy. . . . But project a society of millions, in which there is every kind of viewpoint, every kind of brain, every kind of morality—and no government. . . . No one can guard rights, except a government under objective laws. . . . Rational men are not afraid of government. In a proper society, a rational man doesn’t have to know the government exists, because the laws are clear and he never breaks them. [FHF 72]
[1]: Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A, Politics and Economics, Libertarianism and Anarchism
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