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I believe libertarianism to be utopian. Kinda like communism. Both could work except for the nature of humans. I have friends who call themselves libertarian. They are not hateful, they are responsible folks who believe everyone should face up to their responsibilities thereby eliminating the need for government programs that help support them. The problem here, I think, is that they generally dismiss societal factors that are actually quite real. For them, the much ballyhooed free market is a beautiful, self-correcting entity that will eventually right all economic wrongs and any government that tries to regulate it will only mess things up.There’s really no such thing as a totally free market. Markets have to have some kind of regulation. What matters is who makes the regulations. Libertarians seem content to allow those within the market to make these regulations. When you do that the fat cats with more control over capital tend to dominate those with less eventually driving out the little guys. Now I share with libertarians the idea that the US government is currently regulating things badly. But I think it’s precisely because the fat cats today control our government that the playing field isn’t level. Again, unfettered capitalism would work, along the lines of the libertarian ideal, were it not for human nature.History has shown that once you get economic leverage over others you’re likely to exploit that advantage rather than maintain fairness. To maintain economic fairness you need regulators with no specific financial interests in the machinations of those whom they regulate. Otherwise you’ve got a fixed game where the House always wins. And that House is made up of Big Money interests that are accountable to no one but themselves. This is how society has functioned for most of its existence. ‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer’ is a statement that has been applicable for most of human history.And throughout human history charitable approaches to helping the poor have come up short. Generally way short. If you don’t mandate helping the poor they don’t get very much help. That’s how it’s been for millennia, how it is now and that’s how it will probably be for the foreseeable future.

My cat hid in a closet for twelve days without food or water, and survived.Before I tell this story, it’s important to know that the cat in question is a Norwegian Forest Cat. Well, possibly not a purebred one, since she was a stray we adopted, but she fits the description point for point. The two most important points for this story are that her mews and other vocalizations are very quiet—her usual speaking voice is a purr-mew that sounds like ‘blert’ or ‘merf’—and she has very puffy long hair which makes her look much larger than she actually is. To the untrained eye, she looks like a 20–25 lb cat, when she’s actually about 13 lbs, a reasonably healthy weight for an old cat of a large breed (Norwegian Forest Cats are thought to be related to Maine Coons).Here’s Catface, looking as fat as possible in her Pyramid Pose:There really is a normal-sized cat body under all that fur, though:Anyway. The husband and I recently moved from New England to Texas; to break up the long drive, we spent a few days with my parents in Mississippi. Since we were moving, we naturally had the cats with us. For most of the time we were in MS, Catface hid in our room; she’s fine with my parents, but freaked out by unfamiliar places. She spent almost all of our visit hiding under our bed, although I managed to persuade her to inspect the house once or twice; she’d sniff around for a few minutes, then go back under the bed.Because we needed to be in Texas at a specific time, we’d planned to leave MS in the middle of the night, allowing us to get where we needed to be in the early afternoon of the next day. So, we got up at midnight and packed up what little needed to be re-packed. The bedroom door was open, and I distinctly remember Catface finally coming out from under the bed, and giving me a can-I-get-away-with-this look as she set off to do a quick bit of exploring. An hour or so later, we were ready to go. We scooped up the other cat, Satchmo, easily. Then we went hunting for Catface. We assumed she’d run back under the bed as usual….Nope. Nowhere to be found. We spend a couple of hours searching every nook and cranny, walking around outside with treats, everything. We woke up my parents (remember, this was very late at night) and had them join in the search, including in their bedroom (despite their door having been closed the whole time).Now, here’s where the Norwegian Forest Cat not being as fat as she looks becomes important. In spite of being told she wasn’t as fat as she looked, and even after picking her up and seeing how light she felt, my parents just could not wrap their heads around the idea that she wasn’t gigantic. So, all the places they thought of to look were places that could fit a giant, fat cat. They’re cat people, and know that cats can squeeze into small places, but they just had a mental block with this cat. Even though I reminded them several times that she could fit into surprisingly small places, I could tell that they still couldn’t accept small hiding places as being reasonable to search.Finally, we had no choice but to give up, drive on to Texas, and hope that my parents could find her. We sent them photos to post, and they contacted all the applicable vet offices and so on. Sadly, though, almost two weeks passed with no sightings; we came to the conclusion that she’d slipped out while we were loading the car, and was either long gone or dead.…Until we got a phone call from my parents, twelve days after she went missing. My father was in his office, which is a converted bedroom with a closet, and heard a teeny tiny little Norwegian Forest Cat mew. He swooped in—but in spite of her finally having deigned to make a noise, it still took him a while to find her, because she was smooshed into a ridiculously small space in the closet that looked barely big enough for a gerbil!She was so weak she could barely lift her head, and after calling us they immediately got her to a vet. The vet didn’t expect her to survive, but gave her fluids and so forth anyway. Because of the long drive, we weren’t able to pick the cat up right away, but the vet told us that A) she probably would die before we got there, and B) even if alive, she shouldn’t travel for a while. So, we wound up leaving her with my parents for a couple more weeks. To everyone’s shock, she survived, and after only a couple of days was almost back to normal.Based on the fact that my parents found one puddle of pee (in our bedroom), she must not have spent the entire 12 days in the closet, but based on her condition when found, the vet thinks she probably did spend almost all of it there. If she snuck out once, maybe she managed to get water from a leaky faucet or a toilet with the lid up (as if my mother would allow a toilet with a lid left up in her house!), but there certainly wasn’t any food to be found, and there were no known easy water sources: no other pets so no other water bowls, no dishes left to soak overnight in the sink, no indoor irrigation, no known leaky faucets. Also, my dad keeps the door to his office closed when he’s not in it, and he would have heard her if she’d scrambled out of her hole when he was in there.She lost 2 lbs, which she has since regained, and has had no lasting bad health effects of any sort, even though she was a senior, 13 year old cat when this happened. Over a year later, the only real difference we’ve seen in her behavior is that she’s now slightly more of an alpha cat towards our other cat: she’s a lot more likely to steal Satchmo’s food or favorite spot than she used to be.

No. "Darwinian" is a sloppy and misleading way to characterize Rand's views.Wikipedia says: "Social Darwinism is an ideology of society that seeks to apply biological concepts of Darwinism or of evolutionary theory to sociology and politics, often with the assumption that conflict between groups in society leads to social progress as superior groups outcompete inferior ones." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_DarwinismThis has nothing to do with Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. Her political and moral philosophy was not based on the application of biological or evolutionary concepts—quite the contrary: her view of man, which underlies her ethics and politics, was that he possessed the distinctive faculty of reason, which set him apart from the animals. She thought of society in terms of individuals, not in terms of competing groups. And the kind of "competition" that exists in biological nature—the brute force of fighting animals—is exactly what she thought an ideal society would outlaw.People use the term "Darwinian" to describe Objectivism because Rand held that charity was not a moral duty and not a proper function of government, and because she extolled the virtues of productive inventors and industrialists. The sloppy thinking I mentioned above goes like this: "Rand didn't want government charity, so she didn't want to help the poor, so she didn't care if poor people are dying in the streets while the fat cats she adored dine on caviar; that sounds like a brutal world where only the fittest survive—hey, someone else said something about 'survival of the fittest', right? Darwin... yeah, Rand must have been a social Darwinist."For a more in-depth analysis, see: http://objectivistanswers.com/questions/980/what-is-social-darwinism