Speaking of Atlas Shrugged:

Our deteriorating circumstances hit me harder and harder every day.

My already jaded views on the legitimacy of our current government are changing at a pace that seems at times to exceed the speed of sound. (Sorry, but that's the best way I can explain the deafening silence I experience daily, as the magnitude of our fall and our complicity in our own serfdom sinks in.)

Legitimacy is the operative word here, because even the parts of our government that are legitimate (or theoretically could be, anyway) no longer perform their legitimate function in society. Take the legal system (please) which now exists almost exclusively to feed itself by forcible extraction. It's obvious that those who most need policing these days are the police themselves. Further examples abound...

John Galt's speech from Atlas Shrugged sums up our predicament - our government, at all levels, has metastasized into "a nightmare infernal machine".

"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man's deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his."

Exactly.

Those who continue to sleepwalk into this slavery have no excuse.

None.