Ayn Rand believed that all government was evil. So evil, in fact, that even borrowing money from it to buy a business was a sin that deserved a death sentence.

Ayn Rand thought that governments were not to be trusted, and the world would be a better place if they didn’t exist, but she still thought an army to be a necessity. More extreme libertarians disagree. They want lots of them.

As far as the Mendocino water shortage is concerned, Ayn Rand’s former disciple Murray Rothbard has presented his own solution to a similar problem. He came, of course, to his inevitable conclusion. Free, unfettered private enterprise would deliver.

Ayn Rand’s well-documented contempt for newspaper owners and the people who worked for them was not logical. If successful, these were people living out her dream. They were in business, and businesses, in her philosophy, should not be subject to regulation.

Ayn Rand despised most educators, but at least she thought that children should be educated. Some of her erstwhile followers went much further. For Murray Rothbard, education was something that prevented children from fulfilling their proper roles, as productive economic units.

One thing I didn’t anticipate when I decided to look at the role played by a railway in Atlas Shrugged was that only a few weeks later the UK would be facing something of a rail crisis of its own. But at least our rail companies have not taken the Ayn Rand option, and blamed the passengers.

The past few weeks have not been good ones for rail travel, and train crash and the reasons for it is also one of the main events in Atlas Shrugged.

In what is still known, with unintentional irony, as the United Kingdom, we are currently enjoying the spectacle of our royal family indulging in one of its recurrent orgies of self-destruction. What would Ayn Rand have thought?

Ayn Rand would not have approved of the military take-over in Myanmar, but if ever a country actually tried to put her ideas into practice, it would surely end up in something very like the condition to which Myanmar now threatens to return.

Ayn Rand hated government, and Trump’s calls to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington would have been music to her ears