Having dealt  with the question of slavery and its undeniable existence in the pre-Civil War United States, Rand backtracked to answer an earlier question from the West Point graduating class concerning the treatment of the Native Americans. If anything bad had been done to them, it was, according, entirely their own fault, for not obtaining clear title to the land they occupied, before the Europeans arrived. In any case, it was their treatment of the new arrivals that aroused her ire.

Having dealt with the benefits conferred by slavery on the West Africans transported to North America, Ayn Rand turned her attention to racism, and the responsibility of liberals for its existence.

In 1974 Ayn Rand was invited to address the graduating class at West Point, and in the discussion that followed defined her position on three different topics, one of which was slavery. She was against it, but her justification of that position forced her into some very contorted reasoning, and also revealed her astonishing ignorance of historical fact.

Ayn Rand was obsessed with railways, which she saw as symbols of progress. It is therefore not surprising that so much of the action in Atlas Shruggedl centres around a railway, or that some of its most famous passages focus on a rail disaster – the death in the Winston Tunnel of everybody on board the Taggart Comet.

Inevitably, the coronation of Charles III has focused many minds in the UK on issues surrounding the inheritance of wealth, power and privilege. Notably, it prompted the Guardian newspaper to undertake a detailed analysis of just how much the new king is worth, in strictly monetary terms and how much he costs his subjects. The results have been surprising, and shocking, but equally surprising, and shocking is the extent to which such information has been, and still is, concealed from those who, ultimately are paying the bills. That secrecy has been very necessary, because what it has hidden is almost impossible to justify.

So the UK is now a member of the Comprehensive & Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, whose nearest member (Canada) is thousands of kilometres away across the Atlantic. In promoting the deal, the best our Prime Minister could find to say was that “British car producers would previously have paid tariffs of 30% to export their cars to Malaysia. From today, that goes down to 0%”.

Ayn Rand is often credited with having made predictions that later came true, but all she ever did was follow generations of better and wiser people in deploring corruption. When it came to suggesting realistic measures to counter corruption, she failed completely.

During her 77 year lifetime Ayn Rand experienced disaster in many forms. She knew earthquakes happened. Did she have anything to say about them?

Is the gold industry getting a wee bit nervous? It seems unlikely, with the world so invested in it, but in the last few months my LinkedIn feed has been in frequent receipt of messages pleading with me to “explore all gold’s potential benefits” and then invest in the stuff

In the UK, Christmas 2022 is going to be mainly notable for strikes, many of them by ‘essential workers’. Which does rather beg the question – If the services being provided are so essential, how is it that the people who provide them are not decently paid?