An excellent text and one i entirely agree with, even me, an economist who indeed does find economics a very useful and insightful discipline. People must come to grips with the issues of coordination in societies of tens or hundreds of millions of people. When you understand the concepts of suboptimal steady states (equilibria) in Nash games, you understand the need for “The State”, which is never all good or all bad. The intellectual shortcuts the likes of Rand take go under the radar for most, but an honest effort to untangle the whole thing does indeed uncover major issues. My country (Canada) has better life conditions for 90% of the people than the USA does, and yet we also do not have “hoards of looters and needers”, our rich are also well-off (don’t worry for them), and the country is generally way more functional… same for Germany and so many other countries.