Dave Winer: When I was 17, I read Atlas Shrugged and it "changed my life." For about a year.

So in the Ayn Rand view, who’s supposed to plow the streets when a Snowpocalypse happens? That’s a detail she never seemed to have gotten to.

Here’s why she doesn’t have an answer — snow storms are socialist. They hit everyone the same. We have a collective interest in getting the streets cleared asap, so we can get to work, so the ambulances can get in to take people who have strokes and heart attacks to the hospital, etc etc. We got a tiny peek, in NYC, what an Ayn Rand paradise would be like. Because we’d still be under a couple of feet of snow, a week later. Snow doesn’t care how much Reardon Metal you have or if Dagny Taggart thinks you’re hot.

Another thing that’s socialist is sickness. Like snow, it’s universal. Everyone gets sick, sooner or later. But it could happen sooner. That isn’t a function of how good you are, or how hard you work, and sometimes even being rich doesn’t help. It could just be random. You might require hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to keep alive, and you might not (probably don’t) have it. Now you might say you deserve to die, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The disease itself is socialist. It cuts across the population in a way similar to the snowstorm. It hits everyone of us. But how or when, or how much, that’s an unknown. So somehow you have to deal with it. One way is to accept fate and die young if you don’t have the money to get the treatment. Or you could buy health insurance. It’s not clear whether Ayn Rand liked health insurance or not. It’s both capitalist and socialist at the same time. Or you could get so rich that you could self-insure against any disease that could hit you or your family or anyone you would miss. Nice plan, but sad to say, most people don’t get there.

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