On another note, jeffmoskin, Balph Eubank from ATLAS SHRUGGED is very real today, and is said to have been the inspiration behind TWITTER, a social media platform for people in America who are functionally illiterate and have nothing of substance or consequence to say, like Balph himself, but want to exercise their Constitutional right to say it anyway, which is why TWITTER not only exists, but is a huge money maker for Jack Dorsey, who is said to have studied up on the philosophy of Balph Eubank the way the bearded buffoon Ben Bernanke studied up on the GREAT DEPRESSION, with Jack calling Balph a true visionary of our times, as the stories go, anyway ...Balph Eubank
Balph is an author, and though he didn't write our favorite fake book, The Vulture Is Molting, he wrote something that comes a close second:
"What is the name of your new novel?" asked the wealthy woman.
"The Heart is a Milkman"
"What is it about?"
"Frustration." (1.6.1.83-86)
Overall he's shown to be a very snobby and needy person.
Balph shows us what a sorry low state arts and culture have sunk to in the country.
And what people in this country who do TWEET on TWITTER like Joe Biden do not know or understand about Ayn Rand and her views of America, is that she was not born here, and she didn't grow up here and get her cultural values and understanding of people from here ...
She grew up in Russia in the time of Lenin ...
Of course, I doubt people would know what that meant, thinking Lenin would have to be the dude who was with the Beatles, the one who was gunned down in NYC ...
So we truly are in the AGE OF BALPH EUBANK in America today, and Ayn Rand called that one right many years ago, which is why I think she was gifted with prescient vision, although a lot of her formative thought would have come from Marx and Engels and how they saw America ...