THERE ARE A FEW FOLKS I'D LIKE FORBES'S RANDIAN TROLL TO MEET

I really don't want to waste my time doing a thorough rebuttal of this bit of Forbes clickbait -- "Give Back? Yes, It's Time For The 99% To Give Back To The 1%" by overgrown Ayn Rand fanboy Harry Binswanger. Binswanger says we should exempt anyone who earns a million bucks a year from income taxes; hr wants the Congressional Medal of Honor to go to the year's top earner. He's trolling us, and I won't rise to the bait. But I'll briefly address Binswanger's worldview, mostly in images.

He writes:

Let's begin by stripping away the collectivism. "The community" never gave anyone anything. The "community," the "society," the "nation" is just a number of interacting individuals, not a mystical entity floating in a cloud above them. And when some individual person -- a parent, a teacher, a customer -- "gives" something to someone else, it is not an act of charity, but a trade for value received in return....

All proper human interactions are win-win; that's why the parties decide to engage in them.... Voluntary trade, without force or fraud, is the exchange of value for value, to mutual benefit. In trade, both parties gain.

In response to that, all I've got is this:





And this:

A team of strangers became instant heroes Monday when they came to the rescue of a worker caught in a building fire in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood.

The man was reportedly refinishing floors in a fifth-floor apartment when the room burst into flames. As he straddled a windowsill, neighbors clamored to help.

Victor Peralta told ABC station WABC-TV in New York that the man looked like he was about to jump.

"He was panicked," Peralta said. "I told him, 'Hold on. Don't do it.'"

Rosendo Lopez, a building super, brought a ladder to the fire escape and after the worker made his way to a fourth-floor window directly below, a group of men created a bridge with the ladder and helped him across.

"Soon as they got close enough to grab ... we just tackled him on to the fire escape," Frank Gonzalez said.

And this:





Binswanger? I don't get him. There are sociopaths to whom this happens naturally, but I really don't understand why anyone chooses to try to live without a human soul.