I concede your point, which is very well taken. But you will recall it is not just Mr Obama who extols the achievements of the Gilded Age and the financial triumphs of the late 19th century, an era of totally, completely unregulated commerce; and which as Ayn Rand points out, is filled with looters and plunderers passing themselves off as merchant princes.

The point is, how do you distinguish between "businessmen who made their own way and businessmen who thrived on government power and favors"? Do you ask them? Do you send out inspectors? Is there any way to do it constitutionally? Will the bad guys simply disappear if you do away with government altogether?

And if you do manage to successfully distinguish between them, how do you encourage the genuine ones and discourage the others? By regulation and law? With lawyers, guns and money?

They all claim to be legitimate entrepreneurs. These are not frivolous objections. These are valid questions. After all, if Libertarian priciples were self-evident to all, and naturally superior in practice, then they would arise and spread naturally because they would be intrinsically more efficient. They would crowd out the Crony Capitalists.

Wouldn't the crooks not be able to compete with the true capitalists, and the free market then quickly weed them out? That's not what Theodore Roosevelt concluded, in fact, he found just the opposite. Real businessmen could not compete with the Robber Barons and the Trusts.

True economic justice may take different forms to different people. But I think we can all agree it does not emerge spontaneously from the chaos of commerce and industry. Left to itself, you will get an economy presided over by what are essentially criminal gangs. Sort of what you have now in Russia and China, and which I believe is now evolving here.