It's too complicated, I followed though up to the first carnival example. The premise is wrong, becaues it takes statism as a given: the winners will benefit at the expense of the losers. That's true

What are people's thoughts on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque - it's dicey. Does it fall inside or outside the rubric of Objectivism? This example is against free trade. C

Hm, this got me thinking. Maybe you should team up with Arestovich. He has grand plans, or, rather extraordinary understandings about how to run the world correctly. John Stossel quotes twice Objectiv