Rob misspoke saying "workers and producers." It's not what he meant. It's obvious to the dimmest brain that workers are producers. The only difference between someone who builds a business around a new product and someone who works on a line constructing that product is a matter of degree.

It's almost the same mistake people make when talking about "producers" and "consumers," but that's another story.

The person who founds a new industry is a producer. So is the person who makes jewelry out of scrap metal and sells it at the craft fair. So is anybody who waits on tables and creates value with his service. It's obvious some of these people have the potential to create more wealth than others, but they are all creating wealth in one form or another.

I don't know how people's thinking about economics can get this screwed up.

The "47 percent," already rewritten in your head to mean what you want it to mean, was the percentage of people who paid no Federal income taxes. And yes, a great number of them are workers/producers If you check on how many people pay no payroll taxes either, that number drops in half.

If you had actually READ anything by Ayn Rand, even just the fiction, you would have seen that her heroes encompassed both industrialists and hand laborers, that most of her heroes occupied both niches at one point or another in their lives, and that her villains were primarily immensely rich bosses or elites using government to loot the system.

If you read Atlas Shrugged, there aren't any lower-class villains in the whole damn book. Almost every bastard in it works out of a drawing room, board room, or corner government office, and in many parts of the book, they are getting much richer than the heroes.

(Edited for Bad Manners.)