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Let's stipulate that free markets are the optimal economic arrangement and that taxation is theft and regulation oppression. Still, it has always disturbed me how those who favor free markets have framed the issue. If people were rational, they would choose a free market economy. They aren't so the choose socialism, in one form or another, instead. Socialism is as natural as any other human vice. And while it may not have always been called "socialism", the essential elements of it stretch back throughout human history. I suppose you might quibble about the moral self-justification that socialists claim but when has anyone ever not justied their most horrible actions? One need only note the self-satisfaction of the Nazis to see that. As much as I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, as one critic of AS2 recently noted, it has a utopian thread running through it as if to believe that the right combination of events would cause people to finally see the light and truth and realize the errors of their ways. Socialism is a diesase of the human soul, one to be endured like natural disease and natural disasters. There is no cure. Death and taxes. Discuss?