Last week Boortz made a comment to the effect that if you have to choose who to rescue in a natural disaster, you should go for the richer people, as they contribute more to society. This of course set off a firestorm. I decided to read the Democratic Underground thread about it. These people are crazy!! They totally misinterpret everything, and take statements out of context, and then pat each other on the back for proving to the world that Boortz is evil. At one point someone wondered how those rich would fair if an area was set aside where only rich people could go, and they had to do all the jobs, cleaning floors, nursing, etc. Most of the crowd in that forum laughed about it and said they'd all fail, blah blah blah. None of them bothered to think of the corollary. If all the rich people are off in a state together somewhere, who is going to pay everyone else for their jobs? Without all the rich people, who will own the companies that give everyone else a livelyhood? There's no doubt in my mind that the average rich person could learn to mop a floor quite well with 5 minutes of instruction, but if you put the average poor person in charge of a large corporation, it will fall apart in a very short time. There are plenty of rich people who got there by inheriting money, but far more of them are Ayn Rand's producers, and got there by working their asses off, and not making stupid decisions like having a kid at 16. Those people are definitely more valuable to society than a poor person on welfare who dropped out of high school at 16 to become a street corner drug dealer.