If you have not read Atlas Shrugged you should. Skip the insanely long radio monologue though. I read a few pages of Galt restating Rand's basic theories and skipped the rest. I could have skipped earlier than I did.
If you have read the book and remember some of the key points this may make some sense.
Lets get the offensive bit out of the way first.
Muslims would curse and burn the book after reading the demonstration of the sonic weapon. Imans would ban it.
Liberals would read the book and clamor for more research $$$ from the government so someone 'for the people' can discover the secret of power from static electricity in the air and free 'the people' from 'those greedy oil and coal mine corporations'.
Selfish twits will take to heart the paraphrasing ' I will work for the benefit of no one but myself' completely ignoring the sub-message of the satisfaction of doing a job really well --while making a profit or good living mind you.
Some religious types will be aghast at the lectures against letting religious pressure (or general guilt) drive one to support a hoard of moochers and ne'er do wells. Rand does not push any 'joy of giving' but if one has real faith or charitable instincts they are not going to close up their purse based on the book; but anyone who gives out of guilt or to maintain appearances probably assumes an attack on all kinds of charity or helping someone get back on their feet.
The books praises capitalism. The Franciso character talks at one point about the American 'invention' of the phrase 'making money' explaining that the old world tended to have a view of a finite set of precious resources (ie gold, jewels) where someone has to deprive others to collect more 'wealth' for themselves, whereas Americans understood that figuring out how to develop new resources created new wealth. Also a bit about how improved standard of living --ie refrigerators (book was written in the 1940's) benefits everyone by freeing up time that formerly had to be spent just maintaining basic food and shelter needs.
Anti-government/anarchist types will revel in the government as one of the bad guys, completely ignoring that some of the Galt's gulch denizens are judges and philosophers who simply want to return to a limited republic as espoused by i.e Aristotle, where the rule of law provides protection to everyone, rather than law being twisted to take from producers to give to masses or the political contributors in order to buy continued power for the politicians.
Well this is very rough -- the reasons my blog is pretty much read only by me 1) its only a few times a year I have coherent enough stuff to even write them up. and 2) I never polish them beyond the rough first draft when I do write something like this. 3) also I could not use news articles, or my reactions to the tv MarxSpewMedia for filler as I cannot bear to watch them to generate the outrage or occasional HAH reactions.
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