Ayn Rand paid enormous taxes all her life and had every right to get back what she could. It was not a "vast difference" of hypocrisy. She wrote about this principle in "The Question of Scholarships".

Alan Greenspan began his work in the Ford administration to make a difference for the better, not to help or exploit 'socialism'. He seems to have continued with that attitude in trying to at least minimize regulation, though his reasoning and actions became increasingly dubious. He still admired Ayn Rand but clearly was not an Objectivist.

Thanks, winterwind. I think Heinlein's young adult fiction is magnificent. Those are the books that many engineers say inspired them. They still inspire me.

When advising people to/on reading Heinlein, it's important to differentiate between his early "young adult" fiction and his later, post Strangers, work. Of course I advise people to read his whole body of work, but his YA pieces make it easier to find the philosophical points. As an example, try the 2nd version of Red Planet. He was required to take out all of the pro-gun material in the first one, to get it published. The second one is much richer.
It also occurs to me that YA Heinlein is, among many other things, a primer on how to live, while his later work is more about living your life. hmm...

Heinlein wrote many interesting stories. One of my favorites is "Time Enough for Love". Lots of thought provoking stuff in it.

Security guards, body guards, and local and state government aren't a problem as long as they remain within Constitutional limits and proper applicable law protecting the rights of the individual. But in this culture they don't, and there is no short term way to change that.

If people understood enough and had enough integrity there wouldn't be any need to 'shut it down'. When they don't there is no way to do it -- if they won't vote ethically on the right principles then why would they revolt for anything but more chaos?

This isn't a matter of government actions widely recognized as corrupt, it's much more fundamental. There are occasional minor corrections when it gets bad enough, but they are zig-zags on a fundamentally downward course because people don't know what else to do. The politics follows bad philosophical premises.

Heinlein disclaimed most of the moral views espoused by his characters. For a discussion of what he really believed, read his Expanded Universe.

I am not proposing anarchism or anything like it -- just that the government works for us, and from time to time needs to be shut down against its will and replaced, because the rest of the time it is always accumulating power and never giving any back. And that competing "police" are not a problem as long as they're willing to follow the one ultimate law.

Yes, the principle of limited government is neither anarchism nor Chinese dictatorship, which are a false alternative with much in common with each other: arbitrary force.

It's fairly well known in the libertarian movement that Prof de la Paz was really the late pacifist-libertarian Robert LeFevre, whom Heinlein knew well.

LeFevre's most-quoted position was that people have a right to own property "but not a right to any particular property!" If any attempt was ever made either to explain or to rationalize this obvious contradiction, I haven't heard of it. LeFevre had his followers but I would not call any of them true libertarians.

Here I must take Heinlein's side. There does need to be just one supreme law, and an overall governing structure stable enough to avoid constant wars (though there is plenty of room for some kind of federalism under that one supreme law). But I would much rather see occasional wars to restore the objective law when government has started abusing its prerogatives, than the kind of stable tyranny you find running China for most of its history.

Good grief! Heinlein was born on July 7th. So was I! That must have some meaning, right? Duh -- probably not.

That is not true. The kind of government we get depends on the dominant philosophy of the nation. That some government workers will likely be open to corruption is not different than the likelihood of any crime.

Unfortunately, history has shown that no implementation of this prevents corruption of the enforcer. Power has always corrupted the one with the power to enforce.

It's a matter of morality -- what is a proper social system for man -- not cost of self defense.

Rand like Locke realized that one must produce to survive but since men have free will and can choose to be evil some will steal rather than produce. Limited Government is the least cost system of property protection that lets the producer keep working rather than sitting with a shotgun on his wood pile. Anarchists want to sit on their woodpiles with automatic weapons and socialists want to steal the wood piles from them. I yearn for a moral civilization after the Objectivist moral revolution when I can work and keep the fruits of my labor without sitting on a pile of empty shell casings surrounded by the bodies of socialists and anarchists: they stink..

One of Heinlein's heroic characters (Professor Bernardo de la Paz of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) described himself as a rational anarchist, but to my knowledge Heinlein never revealed himself as such.

(When Prof first spoke of his political views, someone asked him "Randite?" He replied, "I can live with a Randite.")

And that is what Heinlein failed to recognize. One law, and one enforcer, uniquely authorized to exert force in retaliation.

AKA - feudalism! There needs to be one law of the land and one primary enforcer of objective law.

You can hire your own security guards or body guards, but you and they are accountable under the law.

Agreed. But Heinlein exaggerated when he said Ayn Rand was "a bloody socialist" compared to him. In the end it all came down to the management of force, and whether force in retaliation - as distinct from force in self-defense - was the right of the individual, or the prerogative of the community. She would certainly agree with him that the community need not inspect all goods sold within it. The individual could do that himself, or hire someone to do it. But consider what happens when the clients of two security services have a dispute. As Rand lays it out in "The Nature of Government," such a situation could rapidly degenerate into gang warfare.

That quote makes his position distinct from Objectivism quite clear - like founding Libertarians, anarchists. Oops.

The only sense in which Heinlein correctly described his difference with Rand, is this:

Heinlein was, as he described himself, a rational anarchist. He didn't believe that the management of force was any different from any other good or service. Therefore he believed people retained the absolute right to manage force themselves. Society then became an uneasy mutual non-aggression treaty. See The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for a full description.

Keep in mind that Heinlein made that "less socialistic than Ayn Rand" comment in jest.

heinlien was a good story teller,