If you want to see a great interview with Ayn Rand with Mike Wallace here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTDaVpBPR0&feature=related Mind blowing stuff, I highly recommend watching it and forwarding to a friend. From 1959 and we are talking about the same issues 50 years later.

After five years if you are still camped in a FEMA trailer you have just lowered yourself to the status of trailer trash. I'm sure some of these trailers are so nasty by now they need to be burned.

I haven't finished reading the book but pulled this from the article:

The allegoric lesson of Twentieth Century Motors is much more instructive for the country as a whole, however, than for another automaker, because it is about how "hope" and "change" can motivate people to make choices that lead inevitably to "despair" and 'stagnation."

A former worker at the plant, now a lonely tramp, tells the story years later of how the workers let themselves be inspired by the company's new owners to work for the common good. "They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal."

Yes, a noble ideal, a way to help each other, something no one could possibly oppose. But there were few details on the table when the company's workers were asked to vote on their future, just these vague promises and a few catchphrases on which to pin their hopes.

"None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he ... kept his mouth shut -- because they made it sound like anyone who'd oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being."

And so the workers voted overwhelmingly to follow the new plan, which would mean that no worker would fall through the cracks -- everyone would take care of everyone else. "We thought it was good," the tramp says wearily. "No, that's not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good."

Sound familiar? Scary

Atlas Shrugged is a terribly written book. You can keep it, no matter how prophetic.

From what I have seen so far, after several years of these people living in them, their trailers probably ARE worth $5 or less...
Seriously, how many of the trailers are even in a condition for anyone else to live in them if they move out? Many just sat empty and got moldy and had to be destroyed, anyway. Our tax dollars bought these things, they might as well use them.

Interesting that Milwaukee wants to do away with the voucher program. Being a resident in Milwaukee County, I am well aware of the heavily democrat political system, as well as the victimhood mindset and reliance on welfare in the "less fortunate" areas. At the same time, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is one of the most heavily funded schools in the state... perhaps in the nation. Yet it has one of the lowest graduation rates in the United States.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/29395934.html

The voucher program is available to a very small percentage of students who are lucky enough to escape the nightmare that is MPS. But it looks like another case where legislatures want to 'make things equal' for all kids. Just like the "No Child Left Behind" act, which dumbs down classes and robs the smarter children of additional learning while everyone waits for the intellectually challenged kids to stop texting on their cell phones...

http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/39743127.html

(that school is located about 2 miles from MPS schools, btw)

As long as legislatures try to make all classrooms equal and treat all students as equal, we will bring things down to the lowest common denominator. Which might be what our 'ruling' party wants.

The sad truth is that until the achievers and producers – the taxPayers – refuse to sacrifice themselves to produce wealth and property that can be seized by the Statists to buy the votes and loyalty of the majority, we will continue down the path towards third-world ruin.

The Atlases need to show that they will not be complicit in the rumination of this country and go on Strike – even for a short time and interrupt the Statist's revenue stream.

Ayn Rand must be looking down on us and laughing her head off. I am in the middle of reading, 'Atlas Shrugged', and I am finding that her work is quite prophetic.

Once Obama got elected, my wife and I saw the writing on the wall and started our plans to "Go Galt". I have instructed my kids to do the same as we had already started preparations for them.