| | I think that Randroids (dogmatic, unsophisticated admirers of Objectivism) will dislike this article because they get off on pessimistic news and would have been much more at home in the bad old days that Kudlow describes.
A case in point is proposals to conscript people for domestic service. They've been around since Theodore Roosevelt's time, never getting off the ground but never quite dying either. When the Clinton administration was talking up volunteerism with help from various eminent unknockables like Gerald Ford, ARI's website insisted that this was an attempt to revive such proposals and only slowly gave this insistence up.
Another would be one of my college friends who said ca. 1970 that we were only a few years from internal passports. Yet another would be the number of Objectivists who fell for the email-tax hoax.
Rand herself was prone to this way of thinking. See her remarks about domestic conscription proposals in the 60s (Wreckage of the Consensus), or her almost-gleeful prediction that Nixon's wage-price controls would be politically impossible to get rid of (The Moratorium on Brains).
Peter
(Edited by Peter Reidy on 9/07, 8:55am)
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