Notes on Ayn Rand

   Reading Atlas Shrugged is a reminder that it is futile to argue with psychotics.  I will start with the easy targets, the low-hanging fruit.  To begin with, there is no reason for that book to be more that two hundred fifty pages, the version I struggled through had about one thousand eighty.  All of the additional ponderous verbiage can have no effect other than to shorten the useful life of the reader.  No person with any  sense of human decency would have assaulted the reader with the additional eight hundred fifty pages, but since Ayn Rand claimed she did not believe in charity, that lack of compassion could be explicable. Increasing the length of interminable speeches does not increase their useful content or add any additional perspective to a second rate idea that has already been flogged to death.
   For a more specific criticism, there is Chapter 9, Sacred and Profane.  Among the shattered debris of incoherent thoughts that amalgamate this chapter, Dagney Taggart, who is alleged to be both competent and an engineer, discovers an electric motor but cannot determine its power source.  I can help her, I know somethings about engineering.  If it is an electric motor its power source would be electricity.  She is astounded to be unable to determine what fuel it uses; diesel? coal?  If it were powered by fuel, then it would  not be an electric motor.  What that would be is an auxiliary power source producing motive power for a generator or alternator, depending on whether it is DC or AC, although frequently the word generator is used for both; the generator then powering the electric motor, as in a diesel-electric railroad locomotive.  Upon brilliant reflection, she determines that the power source is static electricity.
    I will now attempt to explain the concept of energy density.  Insects have a carbon based body, that carbon could be used as a source of fuel.  Driving down the road. all vehicles have bugs splatter on their windshields and front ends.  Because of that, since they represent  instant energy content, there is no need to purchase fuel, the bugs can be used for energy instead.  There is, of course, a problem with this plan, which would be energy density.  If a car gets thirty miles per gallon and is driving at sixty miles per hour, it would use two gallons, or about twelve pounds, of fuel per hour.  Assuming that the bugs' bodies solid portion has the same energy per weight as gasoline, gasoline has carbon and hydrogen, bugs bodies have carbon and a bunch of other stuff, some of which burns, others that do not, and that bugs are eighty percent water, they are pretty juicy, sixty pounds of bugs per hour would have to be intercepted per hour by the car.  It would also require the bugs would achieve efficient combustion.  That would be a lot of bugs.  Similarly with static electricity, there would have to be a high enough density of it, which there is not, for that idiocy to work.  In a later, chapter, another charachter says the inventor, who turns out to be John Galt, has a whole new concept of energy.  No, Albert Einstein had a different concept of energy, this is hooey.
   In a later chapter, as the world is falling apart because great men are deserting society, Dagney has the brilliant idea to place men with lanterns in railroad tunnels under Manhattan to serve as signal lights when a piece of copper wire breaks and there is none to replace it, leaving the signal lights blank.  This is stupid, the reason siganl lights exist is because railroad engine drivers do not know what is ahead, oncoming trains, switches set against the train's movement; for years railroads have resisted having radios in engine cabs believing that they will be stolen or vandalized in poorly secured railroad yards, which leaves open the question of why they do not use mobile radios, which could even have a moving map display to make the engine driver's work easier.  Her plan was to set the switches and then run each train through individually, there would be no need for signal lights, since each train would know that the route is set for it, all it would have to do is proceed continuously at a safe speed.  It might be a good idea to have a worker with an emergency lantern in case a switch does not move properly, so the engine driver can be warned to stop, but continuous signal lanterns would be unnecessary.
   In another chapter, Hank Reardon, the inventor of Reardon Metal, invents a new type of truss.  I assume that Ayn Rand had only vaguest idea of what a truss is, there really are only so many ways the pieces can be arranged.
   What any competent writer knows, and Ayn Rand did not, is that writers should never actually try to pretend to introduce anything that they do not understand; if one is writing about a charachter who is claimed to be a great physicist, do not pretend to write equations he might write, similarly, if one is describing a great poet, do not try to actually write a poem.  If a writer knows nothing about engineering, it is wide not to try to pretend to make engineering decisions or analysis.  Or, as the old saying goes, if one does not say anything, no one will know how stupid one actually is.
    The reader eventually arrives in the valley, somewhere in the state of Colorado, where all the capable people needed to run society had secretly withdrawn.  Supposedly, all of these people are highly rational, Ayn Rand also claimed she was equally rational, alas, neither is true.
   The people of the valley use only gold as currency, because they will only use for money objects with objective value, Ayn Rand insisted relabeling her social pathology as a philosophy she insisted on calling objectivism.  The obvious problem is that  gold has no objective value, in fact it is pretty worthless.
    The reason gold has value is because it is bright and shiny and rare and people, like certain hoarding animals, like bright shiny objects.  The fact that it does not tarnish is nice, but it is heavy and too soft to use for any useful purpose, nor does it form useful alloys.  It really only has had any useful purpose for about fifty years, it is very good for the best electrical connections and it has been used to coat astronaut visors because it can be deposited thin enough to see through but still would absorb large parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum.  The other semi-useful purpose of gold is electroplating other metals to form a corrosion proof coating, that is less than a hundred fifty years old, acids and electricity being needed for the process.  Today, vapor deposition of aluminum can be used to form a corrosion resistant  coating at lower cost.  Even for usual electrical wiring copper is typically a  better material, copper has higher resistance but most wires require some degree of self-support and copper is both lighter and stronger.  Over all, gold objectively would be priced somewhat higher than copper but no more.  In addition, with the augmentation of tin, copper forms bronze alloys which can be useful.  The reason why gold prices have been rising for the last fifteen years or so has nothing to do with fierce individualists wanting a hedge against the collapse of decadent governments, it is because people in India really like gold jewelry, as the Indian middle class has expanded, the demand for that jewelry has exploded since people can now afford it, it is a consumer choice and as such can be considered irrational.
   Iron, on the other hand is valuable, it can be used to make weapons, tools, machinery, automobiles, ships, buildings, bridges and sundry other objects.  Iron is valuable gold is dross and people who want a gold standard have their heads up their asses.
    The people of this valley also swear an oath, which is, of course, as useful as the oaths people swear before testifying in court or taking a public office, in both cases the ability of hose oaths to prevent lies and fraud has had the effect so many people have noted with disgust for many years.
   Additional problems multiply beyond these.  The valley is hidden by projectors which cause mirror images of surrounding mountains to appear to cover the valley which no one notices is missing, because it is unmapped.  There is a branch of the United States federal government called the U.S. Geologic Survey, USGS,  Notice the word survey in its title.  They mapped the entirety of the american west, having to haul theodolite sections with thirty six inch graduated plates, the object and casing of which  weighing in the hundreds of pounds, up mountain slopes where they took night time measurements allowing less thermal refraction and greater accuracy.  In the nineteen fifties when Ayn Rand was  dragging forth this misformed creation, there were no unmapped valleys anywhere in the continental U.S.   In addition, I would note that photogrammetry, aerial photo surveying, had been developed.  Usually the photos are taken with the camera facing straight down and the photos overlapped, the differing angles allowing a three dimensional analysis of the photographs, but by the nineteen fifties high oblique photogrammetry, where the horizon is visible in the photographs, was used to map northern Canada.  It is less accurate, but allows for far more area to be mapped quickly, the Canadian government was not too concerned with property claims, they just wanted to know what was up there.  There is no way anyone could have hid a valley.
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   Ellis Wyatt is extracting oil form the ground, of course there is oil.  They had to use mules and men to move the equipment to drill the well in its remote area.  If they are such brilliant engineers they could have placed posts in the ground and then , over short segments, used motors to skid the equipment up and down the slopes by using the posts as anchor points for drag cables attached to the motors, perhaps this is a quibble.
    A bigger factor is the weight of pieces to be moved.  To drill, one needs a motive source, the engine block for an internal combustion engine of enough power would weigh hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds.  It could not be strapped onto the back of  a mule.  Perhaps a steam boiler could be assembled by welding together pieces, but the steel shapes, drill pipe and driving gear would also weigh in the hundreds of pounds, at least.  There is similar idiocy told about the father of Osama bin Laden, that to build a road in Saudi Arabia he cleverly broke his construction equipment into pieces and shipped them by camel across the desert.   At least one book purporting to be a serious history tell this story with any embarrassment.   The engine block for a bulldozer can easily weigh several thousand pounds, as can the frame.  Cutting the frame up and then welding it back together really would not work, the story is nonsense.
   More astoundingly, John Galt has his static electricity to provide all the electric power neeed in the alley as well as run the projectors.  Why are they using gasoline?  John Galt originally designed his fabulous static electric motor for cars, so why are not the cars all powered by them?  Do not suggest man-hours of labor as an issue, they are able to build projectors, static electric generators, haul an oil derrick and other sundry efforts, so this does not seem to be an issue of import.
    More fundamentally, they are supposed to be absolute believers in the free market, but Ellis Wyatt says that when he can increase production he will lower prices.  The concept of yield pricing says that one should sell a product at the maximum net profit for the seller.  So why would he lower prices?  He has a monopoly and if he increases production, which would entail some additional costs, he would drive his own prices down.  The goal is to pick the point of highest yield.  So, if he produces one thousand gallons of gasoline and sells it for one dollar each, he has an income of one thousand dollars gross, if his production costs are eight hundred dollars, he then nets two hundred dollars profit.  If he increases production to fifteen hundred gallons and it hen sells for seventy cents a gallon he grosses one thousand fifty dollars, but his production costs are higher, say, nine hundred dollars and his net has fallen to one hundred fifty dollars.  There idiot oath is swearing on their life that they will not live their lives for others benefit nor ask the same for themselves.  So why would he plan to either raise production or lower prices? Could this be a case of; from each by his ability, to each by his need?  No, that was the whole point of John Galt leaving society and beginning his fearless campaign to do something or other.  Ellis Wyatt should probably actually reduce production to jack up prices and take the windfall, these great, independent geniuses surely do not seem to be very bright, they certainly do not understand economics.
                                                          ___________________
    The valley is the personal property of Midas Mulligan, the man who never makes a bad investment,they all apparently rent property from him.  How did he buy an unmapped valley?  To buy property one needs to specify its boundaries, another minor point I suppose.
   So why do not ehy just get rid of Midas Mulligan?  Because Ayn Rand, in her avatar of John Galt, says tha no one has the right to initiate the use of force against another person.  To which might be replied, why not?  If a person's advantage over another is physical force, why not employ it?  Remember we are being objective here.  The normal argument goes back to the fact that the brain engages in mirror imaging, comparing others to oneself.  That builds a set of mutual obligations between people to avoid harm that each would not want.  Ayn Rand says that societal values and constraints do not matter, each person should only consider their own wants and needs.  She says this destroys the individual nad his freedom, which is true, but if she is also arguing that society does not matter, why should that concern anyone?
   This brings up the most obnoxious aspect of Ayn Rand, she loudly proclaims her atheism but she had the worst form of religiosity.   Lots of people are atheists, lots are agnostic and their is another group who are just disinterested and being an atheist or an agnostic would require wasted effort.   But she had deep religious beliefs even though she could not admit it.
   She was a determinist, people's outcomes were determined entirely by their moral virtues or failings.  In the nineteen seventies, in midtown Manhattan, there was a building called the Pan Am building.  Its roof had been built reinforced to allow helicopters to land on it.  For years this was not used, but then it was decided to try flying helicopters between the roof and JFK airport.  Within the first week, a helicopter, in landing, had its landing gear strut fail from metal fatigue, it fell over on its side, its rotors shattering on the concrete deck of the roof.  No one on the helicopter was seriously injured, but there were deaths on the roof and of a pedestrian two blocks away who was killed while walking down the street by a falling piece of rotor blade.  Apparently, Ayn Rand would have found him morally lacking.  Ayn Rand says that each person can rise to the person's level of excellence.  Actually, it takes a starting point to have a starting point.  There must be something that allows any person to be able to start and organize in order to succeed. At the same time, stuff can happen to interfere with any person's rise.  At the end of the Soviet Union, a large number of soviet trained mathematicians came to the U.S., the number of papers published in mathematical journals by U.S, born mathematicians dropped sharply.  The soviet trained mathematicians may very well have been better and they may have written better papers, but the effect was that american born mathematicians appeared to stop work.  Not only the soviet trained mathematicians but their students as well had more papers published, better work pushed out good work, or to put it otherwise, stuff happens.
   She was incapable of understanding statistics,she succeeded, so she assumed it was entirely through her own brilliance, lottery winners also feel the same way.
   This is also a good illustration of how her fundamental point, that a relatively small number of people are essential to the running of a country and if they leave the country will fall apart is ludicrous.  There is an enormous amount of talent, some is much better than others but it is not zero with a few high points, if the first rank ofAnthem, published in Britainn in nineteen thirty-eight. people is not there , there is still a very good second rank.  But , again, this is the obnoxious range of religious thinking, That there is an elite which must be honored and all others must show them homage.
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   She was also a believer in salvation through revelation.  Most christian religions have tales of peagns falling to the ground wailing in remorse when they are told the revelation of redemption.  they then eagerly submitted to baptism.  In actual fact, many of them were threatened with being burned alive if they did no convert.  Ayn Rand believed in a similar concept, that the truth of her philosophy would cause the scales to fall from men's eyes.  Adolf Hitler believed the same thing.   The original formation of nazi concentration camps were as reeducation camps.  The stated belief of the nazis was that if a a person had German, Aryan, genetics, then the only reason he would disagree with the nazis would be if he did not understand their truth.  They actually had a law, which was enforced, that when a person was released form a concentration camp, after having been reeducated, that person could not suffer descrimination in employment.  So, too, Ayn Rand believed in reformation, which involves mysticism, although she denounces mysticism.
   Hitler;s Mein Kampf  actually is fairly similar to Atlas Shrugged, it is also an overbloated book filled with midless drivel parading as philosophy.  The writing stylke and quality are similar, too.    The interest of Hitler is that one can actually see the workings of a depraved half-wit who became a dictator, it holds a certain fascination.  Hitler said that when reading a book one should ignore everything with which one disagrees, the proud statement of aman who reduced his country to an ash heap.  It turns out that the only edition of Hitler that Iread was translated and abridged, which was merciful, I would also recommend abridged Ayn Rand if it ever becomes available.
   What is hilarious in HItler, is the story of the art institute.  Hitler says that he applied to study fine arts and presented his exemplars of his art work, but the individual who reviewed them said his true talent was architecture, with which Hitler heartily agreed, but for reasons I do not understand, the fine artts study was free but the architecture school required tuition that he could not afford.  There are biographies of Hitler which provide the same story.  It does not make any sense.  Hitler's art work was of buildings, he did a good job of perspective, line control and color.  But they were literally lifeless, there are no people in them.  There is a pen and ink sketch he did during World War I of a destroyed farm house with a bicycle in front providing a focal point.  It is a perfectly good still-life, but perfectly good still-lifes are a dime a dozen.  There is no way from the paintings he did that anyone would surmise architectural talent, they are just illustrations of buildings, there is no indication that he could develop plans or improvements to them.  But consider what an insult of one artist to another is, he is just a draftsman.  Now, Austrians, and particularly Viennese,  are famous for tact and politeness.  The interviewer, seeing the dull, lifeless, renderings, would probably have been too polite to say, "Why don't you try architecture?"  It is more likely that he said, "I see your talent is architecture."  In either case, he meant, "please leave my office and do not come back and waste more of my time."  In Hitler insanity, he was being told of his great architectural talent.  "he recommended that I apply to the school of architecture."  "You really should show these to the architecture department."
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   There is also Raganar Danniskold, the great pirate who attacks charity ships because they are an unjust transfer of wealth to undeserving people.  He gives Hank Reardon a bar of gold as partial repayment for everything the government had stolen form him.  Where are they getting all this gold? No matter, I guess.  Ragnar tells Hank that he is not ding this for Hank, he needs Hank's freedom for his own freedom.  That , in short form, is the theory of social democracy, each person's freedom is dependent on other people having freedom.  Ayn Rand says that social democracy is the road to slavery, she really did need to get her story straight.  The point of social democracy is that if one wants to go skiing , there need to be a ski slope.  Unless one has the money to build it oneself, there is a need to have enough people with enough money who want to go skiing for the ski slopes to be available.  The same is true for going to the movies, enough people need to go to the movie theater for it to open and enough movie theaters must rent films for films to be funded, so, just like Ragnar and Hank people need each other.
    There is also the question of where he built his pirate ship and why aircraft cannot find it, but maybe they made it invisible , too.   One might also question the acquisition of ammunition. At the end of the book he says he will turn his pirate ship. a military vessel into a smallish ocean liner.  That will not work, either.  The compartments and sub-divisions of a warship would not work as an ocean liner.
                                                ____________________
   Ayn Rand was also an absolutist, things must be either white or black.  She denounces any modern attempts to suggest that actions must be understood in context.  That thinking developed as a movement way from rigid religious thinking, she does not like it because she has rigid religious thinking.
    She also denounces charity and yet she accepted charity.  She was hired as a writer by a Hollywood studio in the nineteen twenties, I have read two of her books, Atlas Shrugged and Anthem, she cannot write.  Anyone who takes money for a job one cannot do is accepting charity.  Politicians come immediately to mind.  If I accepted a position as a theoretical physicist, that would be charity, because I cannot do that.  Similarly, if I was placed on the payroll of a hospital as a neurosurgeon, that would be charity, too, because I cannot do that either.  Ayn Rand was a classic example of a poorly socialized schizophrenic, her brain could not compare her actions or reconsider them and so she had no realization she could not do the job for which she was paid.
   In the introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, she said that she found it oppressive to work in Hollywood because they insisted that she write realistic characters when she wanted to write symbolic characters who represented ideals.  They were probably as badly written as the characters in her books.  Beyond that, consider a bricklayer who says that his employers wanting him to lay the bricks in a straight line is and affront to his ideals.
  The story of how she got hired at a movie studio is that she moved to Hollywood hoping to work in pictures and met an executive of the studio while hanging around its front gate.  What kind of person hangs around the front gate of a movie studio?  Someone who is poorly socialized.  So, the story is that Ayn Rand a Russian immigrant who is poorly socialized, meets an executive of a movie studio who is also probably an immigrant, since most were, and was probably also poorly socialized because that is the kind of people who accumulated around movies and who get promoted to executives.  One poorly socialized hires another, there is no way her alleged writing talent could have been evident.  She was hired as a writer and extra so maybe she slept with the guy.
   She claimed that she lived the philosophy she pontificated, yet she wails helplessly that her writing was being rejected.  If she rally believed in her nonsense, why did she not start her own movie studio? She also laments that The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers for, she insists, its revelatory philosophy.  She appears to claim that not one publisher rejected it for being another thousand page droning bore.  Her story is not believable.  And, again, why did she not start her own publishing house?  She wanted someone else to pay to take the risk while she would get a profit if it sold, this is the very behavior she denounces throughout her door stopper.  Moochers who did not have the moral courage to take a chance.  She was one of them.
   What is called projection in psychiatry is the poorly socialized brain panicking when its internal model does not match the facts of the world around itself, the brain cannot contemplate that it is in error so it has to blame the nearest other person.  The brain sends a partial description with the warning and panic, such as,  it looks like hypocrisy, so the brain adopts that as the reason for the fault, someone is being a hypocrite form the facts so it must be everyone else, since I am the only truly honest person.
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   Another bad religious trait she had was a belief in mysticism.  Once again, she denounced it, yet her whole book revolves around it.  People have auras and powers and can summon electricity at will, it is all mystic garbage.  She claimed that she was representing ideal people, but the only trait they had in common was her belief that if such a warped world existed she would be the center of it.
  She did not care much for democracy, but that is a trait shared by all authoritarian people.  She did not seem to think that democracy could self correct, but then again she thought everyone would act like herself.  She could not seem to decide whether she should have complete contempt for all people, or whether they could redeem themselves by agreeing with her insanity.  She has the bad, old Russian, trait,  of believing that there are better people and peasants.  she grew up in Russia and it was because of people like her and probably her family, that the glorious revolution of nineteen seventeen occurred.  She was only twelve at  eh time but she has the right mentality to provoke a violent revolt.  She had a lot in common with Alexandra, the last czarina.
    Alexandra was the German borne granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she never learned proper Russian and the Russian people knew it.  During World War I, she was called,"the German".  Considering that is who they were fighting a war against, it was not a compliment.  She once wrote a letter to her husband, in French,  the czar, in which she said, "the Russian people are simple, they need to be told what to do, I know, I am their matushka (mother figure)."  I would never be in favor of standing people up against a wall and shooting them, but she deserved it, she really did have it coming.
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   Ayn Rand was also a believer in anointed persons who are essential.  They fearlessly fly across the country in small planes to free John Galt,  who smiles while being tortured, again, they are not doing that for john they are doing it because it helps themselves.  Their planes are not detected by radar so they probably made them invisible, too.
  When they confront his guards the guards all crumble because they cannot fearlessly think of twaddle like the valley people.  This is the classic nonsense that our enemies are really afraid of us and will not fight.  That idea usually ends with a mound of our own dead.
   At no point does anyone betray them, even though the vast majority of people are too deluded to realize the4 brilliance of their ideas.  And Ragnar wanders over the country after walking away form his pirate ship without interference.  They have a perfect network of informants who they never fail to correctly recruit without betrayal, more mysticism.  That is a statistical impossibility, but Midas never makes a bad investment, also statistically impossible.
   She was right that crony capitalism is bad and that it is dangerous when a government becomes over involved in business decisions and she has to be given some credit for marketing a product that people buy,but it is a bad product.  She was also an expropriator, her own highest crime, she took work from others, specifically her first bad book, Anthem, published in  Britain in nineteen thirty eight, far too much of that book is obviously taken from The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster, who was British.  In Forster, a future civilization lives in underground rooms serviced by machines, where they have no individuality and are ruled by a committee which does not allow them true personal expression and where they increasingly remove themselves form experience which is a state they come to prefer.  They are terrified of the world outside their tunnels.
    They have tablet computers, wireless internet, and tele-conferencing, but only the outline people's faces can be seen, their emotions are not discernible.  They had insufficient bandwidth, they must have been using copper wires.  The story was written in nineteen nine, but they still needed to upgrade to fiber-optic, that is probably why the machine stopped.  Forster also had a bit of the Edwardian sniff, he did not like the idea of people being reduced to protoplasm, he really would not have liked DNA research.
(The full text of The Machine Stops is available at plexus.org/forster/  with some typographical errors.)
    In Rand, a future civilization has removed the word, "I", and has eliminated all scientific progress, they are terrified of leaving their cities and  have a deep fear of the woods and mountains.  Their committee also destroys individual expression.  Both have controlled breeding of people.  According to Ayn Rand, E.M. Forster would have had the right to hunt her down for her malignant theft, but she was  a complete liar.
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    She also said, through John, that happiness is living one's ideal, actually I think happiness is the absence of boredom and it would be nice if the secret police don not kick in your door in the middle of the night.
   John actually says that people engaging in mindless pleasures are not truly happy, notice, once more, the sneering religious tone, " They think they're happy, but they're not as happy as me reading my bible, they're all really jealous that they can't read a bible like me."
   She also judges people by appearance, all of the great independents are brilliant and good-looking, but Midas Mulligan , the money man was short and fat.  She, of course, was actually unattractive, probable proof of her own incompetence.  Actually , if you look at pictures of Noble laureates in physics, they are a pretty ordinary group, a few were somewhat athletic, some were unathletic, none of them would be remembered if they were passed on a street.  The association of looks with ability arises from the inability of the brain to smoothly track information, poorly socialized schizophrenia.
   It could also be noted that giving oaths is mysticism, which she said was bad.
   In her book people all crave cigarettes, she was a heavy smoker and obviously could not imagine anyone would not be.
   Her sex scenes are really fairly creepy, pseudo rape fantasies.  Like Hitler, she is probably unintentionally self-revealing.
   She says axioms are fundamental rules that must be addressed to be questioned.  Actually, axioms come from mathematics, she has never gotten past Euclidean reasoning, Euclid believed axioms were fixed truths.   For instance, Euclid said that given a plane and a line through any point not on the line, there would be exactly one line parallel, non-intersection, with the given line.  An axiom is any group of a set of ideas that does not self contradict or which does not contradict other axioms in the set.   In the example; there could be zero parallel lines, all lines intersect, the; the Euclidean assumption of one; or, an infinity, there can not be a fixed number greater than one because if there were two, there would be a dihedral angle between the two in which could be drawn more lines, in fact an infinity.  It may not seem to reflect the real world, but that does not matter, there are no contradictions and so they are all acceptable as axioms.
   She said she wanted government to consist only  of the police, the army and courts that agreed with her.  But if the soldiers are doing all the work, it would only make sense for them to take all the4 power, which is the way governments she describes tend to end.
   Francisco d'Anconia controlled the world's copper, but he inherited mines from his family and so was acknowledging the collective wealth of is family, not individual achievement.   He also arranges to have all his mines blown up destroying the world access to copper.  There is a type of mining known as open pit., it involves removing the soil and rock and then extracting the ore through excavation.  There is a very large copper mine in Arizona, among other locations, which is open pit.  It is physically impossible to blow up a hole in the ground.  A wall could be collapsed but then heavy equipment could fairly directly build a new access road.
  The terribly corrupt government can only produce a sonic death and destruction machine in her book, as opposed to the deep thinking of big thoughts which she produced.  this death machine had a handle which when pulled destroyed the machine and everyone in its control building, thqat wa useful to include in its plans, I guess.  It can also be noted that The Machine Stops  ends in the collapse of the machine civilization and the hope of its replacement by the few people made homeless and their descendants who live in the limbo world of above ground.  Here, the corrupt civilization self collapses, also, and there is hope of rejuvenation by the hardy valley dwellers,clearly expropriation. 
   Ayn Rand was spending time with one of her male acolytes who was married, after some years, when he left her she had a nervous breakdown; she will not live for anyone lese or ask anyone to live for her, she has always lived her ideals, yeah, whatever.
   I would also point out that any inheritance is collective wealth, which she abhorred.  She denounces any theft of property but says the U.S. was formed with great virtues.  In fact, all of the land in the U.S. was stolen, it is why settlers wer always accompanied by armed soldiers.  There is now an Ayn Rand Institute to promote her supposed philosophy, did they take the collective wealth of the inheritance of her books?