Expensive stuff runs $3. Cheap stuff $1.40. Either way, it seems we've departed from your 350 loaf norm which, indicates...what? Gold is overpriced or, bread is underpriced?

I'm not sure Wonder still exists. I haven't seen it lately. For cheap bread, most grocers have gone to house brands.

hear hear

Who is the clown who voted this down on behalf of Wanderer. He is in fact attacking Ayn Rand with anti-intellectual personal smears, speculations, and misrepresentations of her positions. It doesn't belong here.

Reality is that if in a society there is more than one group who uses power to enforce their property rights then they will inevitably go to war. Gangs, which use your model of how a society should operate do this -- and aren't terribly protective of the rights of the individual.

You keep assuming that either you have no government or an all-controlling "nanny state". Many more limited government structures are possible, so stop telling me that our current state is predatory, we agree.

What we are talking about is the need for at least a minimalist state. Which is what, as near as I can tell, is what Rand was talking about. This all started with you saying Rand was flawed because she allowed a state -- and then attributed to it all the aspects of the one we have -- which Rand would undoubtedly have disagreed with.

That is quite a non-objective feat you have there: living only by the objective sans subjective. The objective reality includes both that knowable through percepts due to sense data and what occurs within the brain as a mind which is where you create patterns such as concepts which are a part of objective reality since the mind is part of objective reality and not just in some subjective reality floating around in some other dimensional system. As long as you are aware and able to think, you have a part of objective reality called subjective reality to deal with, otherwise you might as well be a non-conscious entity. No matter what argument a person (that subjective thing floating around in you brain with its mind) makes, it is objective since it is part of existence, there is no place else.
As to whether anarchy is better than state would depend on how one wants force to be used in a social context. One context that force is necessary in is in the realm of property rights. Property is that which one acts to gain and keep. The problem is how that which one person gained and is keeping is actually kept without the promise of force being needed. I like that stuff you have so I will try to gain it for myself. Anarchy says go at it and I might try to protect what I consider to be mine or I might have someone that I hired protect it for me. Whatever, if there is no mutual settlement, force will be initialized. Now if a state is involved, force is explicitly implied if no agreement can be gotten to. With a state one can have some idea of what is threatened ahead of time in a geographical area. In an anarchy things are fluid and cannot be depended upon as to what the rules might be whenever one needs to settle a dispute. Either way, one might need to make payment for the service of using force to protect what you claim to be your property. Anarchy would be more involved than a state due to all the time necessary to get protection through some agencies for arbitration and/or force necessary to settle the property dispute.
The state can be financed in many ways but in contemporary times taxation is needed until the world can be civilized. There is no other way to protect your stuff well other than some kind of altruistic anarchistic society where one places everyone's lives as a goal for protection in some fluidly changing boundary of land and water.
Rand was objective enough to recognize that anarchy, even capitalistic, is a contradiction dealing with the use of force in a social context. There is no way to have a society without force being initiated within it and the necessity of paying for the use of force preferably attenuated by the force of law.

The anarchists start with a floating abstraction that makes no sense and then attack Ayn Rand as "contradictory" for rejecting their nonsense. There are enormously serious political and intellectual problems in the world and these clowns respond by going off on a goofy tangent like anarchy as if we didn't already have organizations with payoffs and arbitrary use of force everywhere.

So, we're in crisis, since an ounce of gold will currently buy about 700 loaves of bread?

Call in paid goon squads on behalf of the floating abstraction.

The money in the valley was independent of the outside. It consisted of gold and silver mined in the valley. Your speculations are factually incorrect.

She did use metals. The "dollar" coins in the valley were made of gold and silver privately mined and minted in the valley and described as "objective value" unrelated to the outside money, which was not accepted there.

There was no "logical error". The gold coins were not government dollars and were not tied to the outside money. The novel emphasized that their coins they used as denominated in their own "dollars" were "objective value" made from gold and silver privately mined and minted in the valley. Outside money was not accepted in the valley at all. "Reading your posts again" are not a substitute for reading Ayn Rand for those who want to know and understand what she wrote. What you don't know and erroneously "just told the last guy" is irrelevant.

Ayn Rand's philosophy, which you have not read and do not understand, is not "Rand mind slips" "trapped in her time". Your ignorant attacks are contrary to the purpose of this forum.

I think you should recalibrate your value. Gold currently buys closer to 700 loaves of bread but, were we on a deserted island, I'd give you all the gold in the world for one loaf of bread.

The proper function of government goes beyond trying to prevent a theft or an assault in the first instance. It deals with retaliation after the fact. It deals with the investigation of the criminal offense and the pursuit, interception, and apprehension of the offender. Without government, apprehension, surrender, and detention of a criminal suspect would be out of the question. The rules of engagement would then likely become: shoot to kill.

Wanderer confuses limited government protecting the rights of the individual with his own overt statism and collectivism "providing for the common good" and imposing conscription for service to the State. He even promotes primitive tribalism as an example of his notion of government.

He doesn't know or understand what Ayn Rand advocated and repeatedly misrepresents her. She did not posit that "everyone is honest" and she emphatically opposed anarchism. Her principles and explanations are not "blather" and contrary to Wanderer were not based on "emotional reaction to her times". This is supposed to be an Ayn Rand forum for those attracted to an interest in her ideas, not a place for statist conservatives to misrepresent and attack her without regard to what she wrote or bothering to find out.

So, what does that have to do with the question at hand?

We were discussing Rand's logical slip of giving dollar values to the transactions within the Gulch that were carried out with gold. We weren't debating the value of gold or its historical use as money. She pegged the Gulch economy to the dollar, instead of gold.

Read the book again and you'll find it to be true. I speculate the world was so dollar centric she failed to pull herself out of it and immerse herself fully into her imaginary world, in which, since transactions were done with gold, the Gulch economy would have been independent of outside currencies.

You should read her essay "The Nature of Government" in which she set forth the payment method. She mentioned specifically a government lottery.

Her chief objection to regarding the prevention, investigation, and punishment of crime as an exception to the private-only rule is: what happens when the clients of competing private security services have a criminal dispute between them? "Suppose Mr. Smith, a citizen of Government A, suspects Mr. Jones, a citizen of Government B, of stealing his wallet and wrongfully holding said wallet in his house. What happens when Police A arrive at Jones' door to serve a search warrant, and Police B won't let the Police A team in? You take it from there." Or words to that effect.

Rand limited the proper functions of government to the police, the armed service, and the law courts. All, she said, had to do with managing physical force and protecting individual rights.

Without this institution, laws are a dead letter, and criminal disputes threaten constantly and at any moment to escalate into blood feuds.

There are good and bad in every situation, but you haven't presented a viable solution. With no laws and no enforcement there will be more moral lacks than ever, no one will be safe, and the strongest and most ruthless among us will dominate and within a month ot two you'll have a feudal system where a small group dominates the majority in exchange for protection.

Real government has 3 vital functions.

1.) Catching and punishing criminals.
2.) Protecting its citizens from other governments.
3.) Protecting the border.

Without these vital functions, you wouldn't have a state, no matter how utopic it is, or how benevolent you believe its citizens are.

These functions are NOT voluntary. It would be nice to have it be a voluntary tax, but to protect the rights of those inside the country, there can be no question about paying for it.

Herb, not I do not trust man kind to keep laws and I am fully aware of the nature of man and the good and evil contained within it. The fact mankind has evil is not a legitimate reason for a state. think about the statement. Many men will not follow laws, so lets give a small group of them power over the rest of men in order to subdue this. If there is a group of men that have power over other men, which group will the evil non-law abiding men gravitate to? The producers of the market or the state?
You statement begs the question. If you think a state somehow subdues the evil in men, that means you think the state consists of men absent this evil. the opposite is true