Er, hello. I'm Stephen Notley, cartoonist of the "Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later" cartoon. I discovered this thread on the Internets and I registered and logged in to say a couple of things. 1) I had not read the book. I'd read a proposed screenplay based on the book. I'm *now* reading the book, which caused me to go on the wee Googling trip that brought me here. 2) I am a socialist. 3) No, really. But my definition of socialism is: Human efforts are put to best use in societies. More specifically, I do not subscribe to the battle between labor and capital over who made the wealth as though we were contending over the results of a zero-sum game. I believe that social behavior has a *multiplicative effect* on production rather than an additive effect. That is, when labor and capital work together, they create more than the sum of their individual separate efforts. Capitalists and laborers both, if forced to work without society, will spend their lives on subsistence. If they work together they will create wealth in abundance, more than what both of them together put in. Everyone gets more out of society than they put in. Take the wealthiest, a Bill Gates. He spends 8, 9, 10 or more hours a day of meetings, decisions, at this point in his career likely few technological contributions, but perhaps some. He gets back food, clothing, shelter, transportation, entertainment, the whole panopoly of human creation. Now take the poorest, some bum on the street. He spends 8, 9, 10 or more hours a day putting in virtually nothing except the service of extorting money through guilt from people on the street. And even he gets food, clothing, shelter, transportation, entertainment, a much smaller slice but still far more than he contributes towards the whole panopoly of human creation. We *all* get more out of it than we put in. It's multiplicative. So, given that hooking ourselves into a social system allows us to generate vastly greater wealth than what we'd make alone, how shall we divide the spoils? There is an adversarial relationship between labor and capital, just as there is an adversarial relationship between the defense and the prosecution in a court of law. But both sets of adversaries, while competitors, are also partners in a system with a greater purpose. For defense and prosecution, the purpose is justice. For labor and capital, the purpose is wealth. The system relies on balance between the adversaries. That sounds wishy-washy librul, but it simply means that any powers, rights and privileges accorded to one side of the equation must also be accorded to the other. Seeking the ascendancy of one over the other is asking for a big ol' disaster in the face, it seems to me.
