The title of Atlas Shrugged in Spanish is: La rebelión de Atlas

We have a really nice shooting range right next to the Police Hall of Fame down here in east central Florida.

I'd be moving to your area if I could get back just what I have invested in my place. I built in 1996 and purchased the acres I have the home on (not including the 146 acres attached to it) for $40k and the home cost $190k and the studio $50k plus the pool.

Today I'd do well to get $200 for the place because the federal dept of corrections built a prison 1 mile down the highway from my place. Of course the acreage could be sold for enough to make up for the loss, but I was going to hold onto that as a gift for the kids. Right now it's my private range - but the zoning board is trying to stop that. If they do manage to ban my shooting down there, I will sell it and move.

I bought my east central FL house in 1998 brand new for $172 K. It was up to right around $500 K during 2006. Now it's just under $300 K, but it is paid off. I am completely debt free! But yes, Florida had a huge real estate bubble.

yes, Herb, let's think -- as Rand did -- about how the morally capitalistic people of the U.S. might exercise their power to hold onto our freedoms and reverse this fascist trend (where DC commands the private sector).
Rand sought a method which she could share in a book. I see the AS story as a time-compressed re-claiming of the country. how might it REALLY happen?
Rick Perry has me thinking east texas, sometimes.
my wife and I went to Belize ... interesting.
but we may not need to relocate. the tea party people have shown that, in miniature.
think ... think ... has AS been translated into spanish? could we do a Gideon thing and put copies in gas station rest rooms?
this electronic gulch inspires thought -- and we MUST not let the internet be controlled into oblivion.
think ... think ... -- j
p.s. the potential separation -- between the predominant-givers and the predominant-takers -- is partially revealed in the "blue" and "red" county maps which I'm sure that we all have seen, as from the 2012 election. the predominant-givers are gradually leaving, say, cities like detroit. does this offer a clue?

Sign me up for the Sunshine Coast of QLD.
Miles (oops, Km) upon miles of pristine and nearly empty beaches and nothing like the traffic or hurricane possibilities in FL.
And then there is that little natural wonder the Great Barrier Reef.
Gun control sucks though.

here, here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In Spring 2006, at the peak of the real estate bubble, my apartment complex initially decided to convert to condos but backed off within 2 months when they saw the market was tanking. In the initial condo conversion offer, tenants like me could buy our apartment as a condo and receive $12K off the price. My apartment was a 2 bedroom, 2 bath townhouse with 1 car garage, renting for $1430/month.

The proposed sales price was $370K ($358K after the incentive). The thick condo prospectus listed hundreds of rules. The condo association fee was going to be $405/month! The real estate taxes were estimated at $575/month! When you add in fire insurance, those 3 items were almost equal to my monthly rent. That doesn't even count the principal and interest on the proposed mortgage loan. If I remember correctly, the total monthly mortgage was around $3500/month. There was no way I was going to say yes to that deal...

The price of a 4-bedroom house in my area in east central Florida is in the high $200's. The same house in southeast Florida would cost $700 K, and the property taxes would be six times as high. I know because my sister's family had a house in a Fort Lauderdale suburb by the exact same builder as built mine within one year of ours being built. East Central Florida would be a great winter home for Atlantis. My town (Melbourne) never gets above 92 degrees Fahrenheit either, and it gets just cool enough at night in the summer that you can still sleep (74 degrees F dewpoint max). In southeast Florida, the dewpoint is 80 degrees Fahrenheit for the whole summer.

Back in 2001 when I had a company in The People's Republic of Broward County (Fort Lauderdale), they wouldn't even let me wire the building our business was in for the Internet without significant hassle. I was glad we sold that company to EPT, the pregnancy detection kit people.

I agree with your characterization of SE Florida. Having lived there for 7 years, I can say it is overrun with socialists. The cost of living is high. The weather is great in winter (the only good thing). It's overcrowded. Socialist home owner's associations and condo owner's associations are everywhere. There is a huge population of New York and New Jersey transplants who bring their love of government domination (regulations and taxes) to those 3 counties. It really is the People's Republic of South Florida (PRSF)...

Instead, we should just separate Dear Leader from America.

I understand that Kenya is lovely, this time of year.

The State of Florida is a conglomeration of three distinctly different environments: southeast Florida, central Florida, and north Florida. Any one of those three environments could stand alone as an independent political entity. I live in east central Florida and love it. I am a professor at one of those private universities (Florida Tech) and am vehemently opposed to having to subsidize my competition. The state university system in Florida has become the object of quite a lot of "government support".

For several months, I commuted three hours down each way twice per week to just south of Fort Lauderdale as part of a biosensors company. With that long a commute, I hated all the traffic jams. I disliked the very high level of government interference at multiple levels below the state level with the business that I was a partner in.

Florida has also subsidized a lot of solar energy research in direct competition to a second company I helped start up to convert solid waste of several types into energy, fuels, or chemicals. When Obama took office and put solar energy into favor, we sold our company and shrugged. Solar energy will never be economical. It will always have too high a capital cost.

I mention nothing racial nor ethnic by my statement. My second best friend is Jewish,
and now he makes the same three hour commute I dreaded. I employ people from all over the world in my research group, including one Jewish student, one Hispanic student (the next John Galt), a Jamaican, one from India, one from Libya, one from Brazil, and three other Americans, including one Chinese-American.

Southeast Florida is a little too hot for me, and way too crowded. In the last several statewide elections, southeast Florida has more than cancelled out my community's votes from east central Florida.

East Central Florida is perfect.

Having lived in South Florida (Ft. Lauderdale) for 21 years prior to retiring on Maui, I believe that the State of Florida would thrive as an independent political entity. I therefor question your characterization of SE Florida as The People's Republic of the Caribbean. In fact, as it is home to the third largest Jewish population in America, I'm surprized that you did not also suggest it as Little Israel.

The State of Florida serves as a major provider of winter vegetables for the rest of the country. Florida could also partner up with the other Gulf States; Texas, Louisiana and Alabama, as a consortium of energy producing centers. Florida is also a major dairy and beef cattle producing state as well as a leader in the aquaculture of Tilapia, a delicious and versatile food fish. Florida is also the home of several state and private universities engaged in all manner of scientific and medical research.

If It really hit the fan, Southeast Florida would be my first choice as a place to settle for the climate as well as the other pluses I mentioned.

Interesting thought: what if (hypothetically) we sold that part of south Texas back to Mexico? That should make those "tens of millions" happy, yes?
They wouldn't have to put up with gringos anymore.
Maybe an anti-Gadsden Purchase too.

What we are is what we let happen. We were given a gift, "A Republic, if you can keep it" as Ben Franklin said. From that point on we have caused the greatest explosion of human happiness and freedom to deteriorate until we have what we have today. The solution can be figured out by a 10nth grader. But it's like being on a diet. Putting on the pounds is quick and easy, taking them off is slow and difficult. We were fortunate that unlike Europe, where nations grew out of clans and factions. We are the first nation that was invented by a group of mostly rational men and because of the freedom it provided. Homogenisity (I know, there's no such word but there ought to be) didn't enter into it.

Shrugging in the Ayn Rand sense is not the way we will regain the freedoms of the past. Ms. Rand used a ploy to make a point. It was a marvelous way to do it, the woman could really write, but it cannot work even if it's limited to America. Let's not shrug, let's think.

There are only a few of the separate states that are strong enough to endure as an independent nation. California could have, but they seem to be leading the way in entitlements. One state was a nation before it became a state, Texas. Look at Texas. Seaports, shipping, energy, manufacturing, education, technology, agriculture; they really do have it all. The problem is the Federal government view many of those assets as theirs. The BLM is talking about seizing 90,000 acres along the Oklahoma border... All of the seaports fall under federal government juris diction. Any river that crosses a state border fall under federal regulation. All of the tax revenue generated by corporate tax and individual income tax is of course federal. And the simple fact is Washington will not let any state succeed. They need the fees and taxes of the relatively free to pay for the food stamps and housing of the impoverished and enslaved. They will bring military force into play to keep it. Too much money, too many votes

On another tangent, if several AS investors banned together to purchase a 1000 acre spread. We fenced it. Gated it. Had guard houses at the entrances. Drilled wells, built generation facilities and a road system. We declared it a tax free zone. We are. finally in a place where the mooches and takers could not pollute the lifestyle, what a vision. Then the President of the HOA gets a letter from the EPA informing him our sewage is not compliant, our wells have been condemned, the roads we built interrupted the breeding cycle of the coyotes and also created excess run off of rain. Since we were not solar and wind powered our generation plant would have to pay a carbon tax, to be collected from each individual in the community. If we had a place, the agencies and regulators would soon turn the gulch into their vision of Utopian paradise; all of the collective surrendering their property for the sake of those in need. After all, it's only fair.

I've seen it broken up differently, but similar. The one I saw actually has southern California as its own state separate from Northern California, Eastern Oregon and Coastal Washington. Then you get another chunk that starts in Eastern Washington/Oregon and adds in Idaho, Utah, Most of Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Northern Arizona as a great Western Territory. Southern Arizona, Southern California, Southern Nevada and New Mexico effectively become New New Mexico. Texas, Oklahoma, and much of the midwest north to Indiana go into the Heartland Nation. Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin become the Great Lakes Coalition (or New Canada). New England becomes its own nation down to Washington DC, and the rest form the Greater South.

Here's a couple of theories:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/22320444@N...

A great observation and precisely what is happening today through our various social policies of "divide and conquer". What made America great? We saw it in abundance throughout WWII - we sacrificed, came together, and overcame the odds to win. The overwhelmingly vast majority supported the same cause. Can you imagine what would happen today if everyone were able to do the same thing again?

What keeps us from doing it? First, we are told that pursuing our own interests can not possibly coincide with others' - that everything is a zero-sum game in which some win and some lose. This is the first great fallacy we must overcome.

The second is that there is nothing we individually can do to affect anything, so any effort is futile. I call this the Borg mindset (my apologies to Gene Roddenberry). It is precisely BECAUSE everyone individually makes up their mind to do something that things change.

Third, that part of getting things to change is by advocating the need. That means getting the word out and giving everyone the chance to decide for themselves whether or not to support the cause.

All three of these are vehemently opposed by our current Administration, whether by IRS targeting, misinformation, or social welfare programs.

You forgot to section off southeastern Florida as The People's Republic of the Caribbean.

Moreover, many of those who wish to be something other than Americans have made it fashionable for many Americans to be ambivalent or even hate their own country. Since the TARP bailout, I have not been proud of what was my country and is no longer figuratively my country. Obama has achieved his fundamental transformation, and that is why so many of us have shrugged.

There was a Russian economist who predicted the US would break up into 6 separate countries. http://worldeconomicstorm.com/russian-ec...

Most nation states don't succeed unless their populations are, to a great degree, homogeneous (to borrow a mathematics term). That doesn't mean the population's got to be one race or religion, but its people must have more in common than in difference. Ukraine's breakup began in the early thirties, when Stalin starved much of the indigenous population and replaced it with Russians. He dehomogeneousized the population. One of the reasons Europe fell so easily into WW2 is because the nation states drawn after WW1 comprised nonhomogeneous populations. The unrest was there before Hitler's annexations. Our open border with Mexico is doing the same thing to us, dehomogeneousizing our population, especially in the southwest. Spend some time in south Texas and you'll find many of the last few decade's latin immigrants haven't assimilated and have no interest in doing so. Get to know them and many will admit sympathy with LaRaza; not only are they not like us, they don't want to be. (They want to be Mexican and take the southwestern US with them, having been told, and believing we took the "rich" part of Mexico and left them the dregs, not accepting the difference between San Diego and Tijuana isn't climate or topography or mineral wealth, it's the difference between our legal and economic system and Mexico's legal and economic system.) Living within the United States of America are tens of millions of people who actively wish to be something other than Americans, and tens of millions, perhaps a hundred million more who are ambivalent about being Americans because they don't know anything else.

Watch Ukraine. If we don't reform our immigration policies Ukraine is our future.

I find I can't really disagree with many of his points about the likelihood of the US splitting up after the upcoming economic collapse. The continued use of the US dollar as the world's main reserve currency is the single biggest variable propping up our economy. While we like to think we are somehow different, history shows that economic turmoil or collapse in a country unleashes pent-up regional or ethnic differences that frequently results in a breakup. Our country is polarized politically between socialists and nominally freedom-loving people -- so-called blue states vs. red states. So, there are plausible break-up scenarios that could happen after a national economic collapse of the US dollar...