--- title: "Have You Ever Seen a Well-Sweep: A Tall Post with a Long Pole Resting on It, Swaying Back and Forth?" date: 2026-09-23 description: "Ayn Rand would probably reject the image. She wanted the wall, not the scales. And she\'s entitled to her vision. But even if I choose the scales, I need her wal" author: "Petru Cojocaru" categories: - name: "Science and civilization" url: "https://cojocarupetru.info/science-innovation-and-civilization.md" --- # Have You Ever Seen a Well-Sweep: A Tall Post with a Long Pole Resting on It, Swaying Back and Forth? **Measure twice.** On Ayn Rand, a ruler, and the state we grow up in. --- **A Question That Came from a Phone** It all started with an Instagram post. My son held his phone out across the table, with the gesture he usually uses to show me a meme I won't understand. This time it wasn't a meme. On a black background, in elegant white letters, it said: ***"I advocate the separation of state and economics, in the same way as we had the separation of state and church. — Ayn Rand."*** *Well?* he asked me. *Is it true? Would things be better that way?* I told him I didn't know. That wasn't evasion. I genuinely didn't know what to answer in thirty seconds, between two sips of tea, to a question that very clever people have been arguing about for a hundred years. But I realised something else, too. The quotation had reached him exactly the way most ideas reach people his age these days: without context, without the author explained, without a counter-argument—beautifully packaged and ready to share. An idea in a jewellery box. It looked precious, but you had no idea what was inside. This text is the long answer I couldn't give him then. I'm writing it for him—but also for anyone between fourteen and twenty-something who has stumbled across a sentence like this one and wondered whether it is wise or dangerous. I'll tell you from the start that I won't tell you whether Ayn Rand was right. I'll propose something else instead, which I find more useful: let us not treat her idea as a political programme you vote for or against, but as a **measuring instrument**. A ruler. And I'll show you that, if you use it honestly, this ruler measures in two directions, not just one. But to get there, I have to begin with a workshop. --- ## **The Micrometer** My father was a mechanic. From his workshop I remember the smell of oil, the noise of the grinder, and one object he kept separate from the other tools, in a box lined with felt: the micrometer. If you've never worked with metal, a micrometer is a very precise gauge with one fixed part and one sliding part. With it you can measure the thickness of a part to a tenth, even a hundredth of a millimetre. For a mechanic, it's the difference between an engine that runs and one that seizes up after a hundred kilometres. My father didn't have blind faith even in the micrometer. Now and then he would check it against small blocks of steel, polished like mirrors, which he knew for certain had exactly the thickness engraved on them. They were his reference standards. If the micrometer read anything other than the standard, the problem wasn't with the part—it was with the instrument. He had another saying, which I later heard from many others, because it's an old proverb, not his: ***"Measure twice, cut once."*** At the time, I thought it was just about prudence: check before you ruin the material. Much later I understood that the saying tells us something deeper. A cut cannot be undone, whereas a measurement can be repeated as many times as you like. Irreversible decisions must be preceded by repeatable measurements. In politics and economics we often do the reverse. We cut quickly—with laws, reforms and revolutions—and measure rarely, or never. And when we do measure, we forget to ask what ruler we're using and who calibrated it. Remember my father's micrometer for the rest of this text. We'll come back to it. --- ## **The Girl Whose Father's Pharmacy Was Taken Away** To understand why a woman would want a wall between state and economy, you need to know where she came from. Ayn Rand wasn't born with that name. She was Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, born in 1905 in St Petersburg, in tsarist Russia. Her father, Zinovy, was a pharmacist. He had a pharmacy of his own, built through work, in a building where the family lived on the floor above. For a Jewish family in the Russia of those years, that meant modest but hard-earned prosperity. Alisa was twelve in 1917, when the Russian Revolution broke out. The Bolsheviks came to power promising to take wealth from those who had it and give it to the people. Among the first things taken was her father's pharmacy. Soldiers walked in, sealed the door, and declared it state property. The family fled to Crimea, lived in poverty, then returned to a city where everything was rationed, watched over, and decided from above. Imagine what that means for a clever, stubborn teenage girl. Her father had stolen nothing and harmed no one. He had been a man who did his job well. And overnight, his life's work had become "everyone's"—which, in practice, meant the property of those with the guns. In 1926, Alisa managed to leave for the United States, on a visitor's visa she never once turned back on. She took a new name, Ayn Rand, worked as an extra and screenwriter in Hollywood, and began writing novels. They all tell, at bottom, the same story: a talented, independent person whom society tries to force to work for others—and who refuses. Her best-known novel, *Atlas Shrugged*, published in 1957, is an enormous book, over a thousand pages long. America's inventors, industrialists and creators go on a kind of strike: they withdraw and let a world suffocated by rules and taxes collapse without them. It's a book some people read at sixteen and never forget, and others put down at page fifty. Both reactions are legitimate. From her novels a complete philosophy was born, which Rand called **objectivism**. In short, it says this: reality exists independently of what we feel about it; reason is our only instrument of knowledge; every human being is an end in themselves, not a means to the ends of others; and the only political system compatible with all this is completely unregulated capitalism. I want to say something from the start, to be fair. Ayn Rand is an extremely controversial figure. Some consider her a courageous thinker who defended individual liberty more consistently than anyone else in the twentieth century. Others consider her a novelist who turned selfishness into a virtue and provided philosophical excuses for greed. Many professional philosophers don't take her seriously at all. The *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*, one of the most respected academic sources in the field, notes that even some careful readers of her work find that her arguments too often fail to support her conclusions—a view shared even by many who find her conclusions and her critiques of contemporary culture, morality and politics original. You don't have to pick a side. You only have to understand why a girl whose father's pharmacy was sealed off came to long for a wall between state and economy. It isn't an idea that came from a library. It's an idea that came from a sealed door. --- ## **What She Actually Said** Let's go back to the Instagram image, because it has a small problem. The sentence *"I advocate the separation of state and economy, just as we had the separation of state and church"* does not appear as such in Ayn Rand's writings. It's an abbreviation, a paraphrase—the version packaged for social media. The authentic formulation, which Rand repeated in several essays from the 1960s, is longer and more precise. It says, in essence, that by "capitalism" she means a complete, pure, uncontrolled and unregulated capitalism, with a separation of state and economics achieved *"in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church"*. The difference seems small, but it isn't. The Instagram paraphrase sounds like a personal opinion: "I am in favour of...". The original is a definition: "This is what I mean by capitalism." And the most important words in the original are precisely the ones missing from the paraphrase: **for the same reasons**. Rand isn't just saying it would be good to separate state and economy. She's saying that the reason we separated state and church is exactly the same as the reason we should separate it from the economy. There's another detail almost nobody quotes. In a short text in which she tried to summarise her philosophy "while standing on one foot", Rand wrote that under full capitalism there should be a total separation of state and economics. Then she added, in brackets, that historically no such separation had ever existed. Remember that bracket. It is, I believe, the key to this whole text. Rand herself knew she was describing something that existed nowhere on earth. Not even in the America she loved so much. So here is the first habit I want to propose to you: **when you see a beautiful quotation, look up the original**. Not because the paraphrase is necessarily wrong, but because the shortened version almost always loses exactly the part that would have made you think. --- ## **The First Wall: State and Church** To understand Rand's analogy, you must first understand the first wall. For centuries in Europe, state and church were entangled. The king reigned "by the grace of God". The church crowned kings, and kings appointed bishops. If you held a different faith from the official one, you could lose your property, your right to work, or even your life. The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries laid waste to half the continent. Catholics and Protestants killed each other with a cruelty that seems incomprehensible today—and behind each camp stood a state that believed its subjects' religion was its business. From the ruins of those wars a new idea was gradually born: perhaps the state should have nothing to do with what you believe about God. Perhaps it should protect your freedom to believe what you like, without imposing belief on you. In 1802, Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, wrote to a group of Baptists worried that the state might infringe their religious liberty. There he used a phrase that became famous: the American Constitution builds **"a wall of separation between Church and State"**. The logic of the wall is simple and worth understanding well. Faith is an act of the mind. You cannot be forced to genuinely believe something. You can only be forced to pretend. A state that imposes a faith produces not believers but hypocrites and martyrs. What's more, the entanglement corrupts both sides: the church becomes a political tool and loses its spiritual authority, while the state becomes partisan and loses its impartiality. That is exactly the part Rand takes over. The *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy* summarises her argument well: state regulation of the market corrupts both the state and the market's institutions, just as political regulation of religion corrupts, wherever it exists, both the state and religious institutions. Before we go further, a small measuring exercise, right here at home. Is Romania a secular state? The Constitution says religious denominations are autonomous from the state. But the state contributes to priests' salaries, funds the construction of churches, and religious education is part of the school curriculum. Only in recent years have you had to request to be enrolled in it, rather than being enrolled automatically. I'm not judging here whether that is good or bad. I merely observe that **even the first wall is incomplete where we live**. If you placed a ruler between the Romanian state and the Church, you would find a real distance, but not a total separation. And that tells us something important about walls in general: they are almost always a matter of degree, not of yes or no. --- ## **The Second Wall: State and Economy** Now we can understand what Rand wanted. Her argument has three storeys, and I'll take them in turn. **First storey: the mind does not function under coercion.** Just as you cannot force someone to believe sincerely, Rand says, you cannot force someone to think productively. An inventor, an entrepreneur, a craftsman—anyone who creates something—uses the same faculty as a believer at prayer: their own judgement. If the state tells them what to produce, at what price to sell, with whom to do business, and how much of the result they get to keep, it violates their mind just as gravely as a theocratic state violates a believer's conscience. **Second storey: force and exchange are opposites.** For Rand, there are only two ways people can obtain things from one another: through voluntary exchange, or through force. The market is the realm of exchange. You give me something I want, I give you something you want, and we both walk away satisfied—otherwise we wouldn't have traded. The state is the realm of force. Its laws are, in the last resort, backed by police, fines and prison. When the state enters the economy, Rand says, force enters the realm of exchange. And wherever force enters, free exchange dies. **Third storey: the state that controls the economy inevitably becomes a tyrant.** If the state decides who wins and who loses in the economy, people stop trying to win by serving their customers and start winning over politicians. Business moves from the market to the ministry's antechamber. Rand called this process **statism** and saw it as a slippery slope: each intervention creates problems that seem to demand a new intervention, until the state controls everything. She had seen the bottom of that slope with her own eyes, on the door of the sealed pharmacy. What would be left for the state, then? Rand was not an anarchist. She didn't want the state abolished, but reduced to a single function: protecting people from violence. That meant three institutions. **The police**, to defend you from criminals. **The army**, to defend you from invaders. **The courts**, to resolve disputes and enforce the laws, including contracts. That's all. Philosophers call this the *minimal state*. Now let's make the abstraction concrete, because this is where it gets interesting—and perhaps uncomfortable. In a world built on Ayn Rand's principles, there would be no state child benefit. No state-funded scholarships, no free transport for schoolchildren. Textbooks wouldn't be free, because there would be no state schools. Hospitals would all be private. There would be no state pension, no unemployment benefit, no farm subsidies, no capped energy prices. No public institution would decide which medicines may be sold or what standards a building must meet. Not even money would be printed by a central bank: Rand advocated a return to the gold standard. Rand would say all these things are ultimately paid for with money taken from other people by force—that is, through taxes you cannot refuse without going to prison. And she would say it is immoral to take by force from one person in order to give to another, however good the intentions. Reading the list above, you probably had a reaction. Maybe you thought: "Wait—so my grandmother would have no pension?" Or: "What happens to the children whose parents can't afford school?" Or perhaps exactly the opposite: "Why do my parents pay so many taxes for services that work badly?" All these reactions are legitimate, and all are old. For a hundred years people have argued along precisely these lines. Rand's defenders answer that in a free society, voluntary charity, families, communities and general prosperity would cover real needs better than the state. Critics answer that it has never worked that way at scale, and that before the welfare state many people simply died of treatable illnesses or of hunger. And a question Rand herself left unclear: how would the police, army and courts be paid for without compulsory taxes? She proposed voluntary state financing, through fees for services such as contract enforcement. Many, including her own admirers, consider this the most fragile point of her construction. I have no intention of settling this argument. I want to do something else with it. --- ## **No One Has Ever Built This House** Here is the biggest problem with Rand's idea—and she acknowledged it herself: **it has never existed**. No country in history has had a complete separation of state and economy. Not even the nineteenth-century America libertarians idealise: it had customs tariffs, railway subsidies, government land handed free to settlers. Not even Hong Kong or Singapore, today's champions of economic liberty. In Singapore, the state owns a large share of housing and land. If an idea has never been put into practice, what value does it still have? This brings us to the heart of the text. Think of your physics lesson. You probably learned about **absolute zero**: the temperature of −273.15 degrees Celsius, at which particles would cease all motion. Do you know the strange part? Absolute zero can never be reached. It's a theoretical limit. Scientists have come within billionths of a degree, but they have never reached it, and by the laws of physics they never will. That doesn't make absolute zero a useless idea. Quite the opposite. The Kelvin scale, used by physicists all over the world, starts exactly there. Absolute zero is the point against which all other temperatures are measured. **It is useful precisely because it is an end-point.** A German sociologist of a hundred years ago, Max Weber, proposed something similar for the social sciences. He called it the *ideal type*. An ideal type describes no concrete reality. It's a pure mental construction, deliberately exaggerated, which you find nowhere in the world. Weber didn't build them in order to apply them, but to use them as measures: you place reality next to the ideal type and see how far it is, and in which direction. There's another image, older, that I love. Sailors of old navigated by the North Star. None ever reached it, and none ever tried. But the star showed them where north was—and knowing where north was, they knew where they were. That is my proposal for Ayn Rand's idea. **It is not a house for us to build. It is a ruler with which to measure the houses we already have.** Even if you don't believe a complete separation of state and economy is good, or possible, it offers you a zero point: an imaginary world in which the state has exactly zero involvement in the economy. Against that zero point you can measure any real country, any law, any election promise. And when you start measuring honestly, you discover that Rand's ruler has two ends, not one. --- ## **The First Measurement: How Much State Is in the Economy** Let's begin with the direction Rand had in mind: how deeply the state has entered the economy. You can measure this today, from your own daily life. Take anything you buy—a packet of crisps, say—and ask where the state passed through before it reached you. The price includes VAT, so the state takes a percentage of every packet sold. The factory pays tax on its profits. The factory workers pay income tax and contributions towards pensions and healthcare. The factory complies with food-safety standards imposed by the state, and the nutritional information appears on the packet because a European law requires it. The lorry that brought the crisps paid fuel duty and the road tax, on a road built with public money. The shop has an operating licence, a fire-brigade approval, and a till connected to the tax office. The money you pay with is printed and controlled by the central bank. Each of these points is a **graduation** on Rand's ruler. In an absolute-zero world, none would exist. In North Korea, at the other end of the scale, the state wouldn't just be a checkpoint along the way. It would own the factory, the shop, the lorry, and the decision whether you may eat crisps at all. There are people who make this measurement systematically, for every country in the world. The best-known instrument is the *Index of Economic Freedom*, published annually by the Heritage Foundation, an American institute. It measures twelve types of economic freedom, grouped into four categories: rule of law, size of government, regulatory efficiency, and market openness, giving each country a score from 0 to 100. The 2026 results show exactly the two ends of the ruler. The freest economy remains Singapore, with 84.4 points, followed by Switzerland, Ireland, Australia and Taiwan; at the bottom sits North Korea, with 3.1, behind Venezuela, Cuba and Sudan. And Romania? The Romanian economy is rated "moderately free" in the 2026 index, with a score above the world average but below the regional one. More interesting than the grade is the trajectory. Romania's average between 1995 and 2025 is 60 points; the minimum, 43, came in 1995, and the maximum, 70, in 2017. In other words, Romania travelled a long way along the ruler after leaving communism behind. Then, for nearly a decade, it seems to have stood still—or even slipped back a little. One more figure, simpler: in 2024, Romanian state spending amounted to about 36.6% of GDP, and the budget deficit was 8% of GDP. What does that mean in plain terms? Of all the value produced in Romania in a year, more than a third passed through the state's hands. And the state spent far more than it collected, so the difference was borrowed—which means it will be paid back later. Probably by your generation. That is the first end of the ruler. Rand would read these figures and say: "You see? Far too much state." A socialist would read them and say: "You see? Too little state, compared with the Nordic countries." Both would be using the same ruler. They only differ on where each believes the needle *ought* to be. That is the ruler's first lesson. **It doesn't tell you where to be—only where you are.** The decision about where you want to be remains yours. But it's a much more honest decision when you know exactly where you stand when you make it. --- ## **The Second Measurement: How Much Economy Is in the State** And now the part the Instagram image could never show you. A wall has two faces. If you build it to keep the state out of the economy, you must also ask what it keeps out of the state. Ayn Rand feared almost exclusively the first direction. For her, the danger was the state that confiscates the pharmacy. She paid almost no attention to the symmetrical danger: **the pharmacist who buys the state**. Economists have a name for this: **regulatory capture**. The idea was clearly formulated in 1971 by George Stigler, an American economist who later won the Nobel Prize. Paradoxically, Stigler was himself a defender of the free market. He observed that rules made by the state to control an industry often end up being written by that very industry. The agency meant to oversee energy companies ends up run by former energy executives. The law meant to protect consumers is drafted by the producers' lawyers. The "safety" standards are designed so that only large firms can comply, while small competitors are eliminated. See what happened? It isn't the state that entered the economy. **The economy entered the state and put it to work for itself.** In the post-communist countries, the phenomenon has an even harsher name: **state capture**. The World Bank studied it in the early 2000s and found that in some post-communist countries it wasn't the state controlling the economy. A small number of firms and wealthy individuals controlled the state: they bought laws, judges and contracts. How do you measure the second direction? It's harder, because the phenomenon hides. No one announces publicly that they've bought a law. But approximate instruments exist. One is the *Corruption Perceptions Index*, published by Transparency International. For 2025, Romania scored 45 points out of 100, on a scale where 0 means a highly corrupt public sector and 100 a very clean one, ranking 70th in the world. Now put the two measurements side by side. Romania is "moderately free" economically and has a significant level of perceived corruption. What does the combination tell you? That the Romanian state is not just too big or too small. In certain places, it is **penetrable**. The boundary between public and private is porous in both directions: the state enters the economy through taxes, regulations and state-owned companies, while certain private interests enter the state through rigged contracts, political appointments and legislation written to order. Rand would see only the first flow. A critic of capitalism would see only the second. **The ruler, used honestly, sees both.** --- ## **The States That Are Not States** There is one more form of the second direction—one your generation knows better than mine, because you live inside it. Think of a digital platform you use daily: a social network, an online game, an app store. Now look at it with the eyes of a civics teacher. The platform has **laws**: they're called "terms and conditions", and you accepted them without reading, like everyone else. It has **police**: algorithms and moderators checking your posts. It has **courts**—or rather, it doesn't: if your account is locked, there is usually no judge, no defence, no real appeal. It has **currency**: diamonds, virtual coins, V-Bucks, Robux, which you buy with real money and spend by its rules. It has **taxes**: for years, app stores took a substantial cut of every sale made through them. It even has a **border**: if you leave, you lose everything you built there—friends, history, purchased items. In other words, it has almost all the attributes of a state, and none of the controls we have learned, over centuries, to impose on states: elections, separation of powers, guaranteed rights, independent courts. The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis calls this phenomenon **technofeudalism**. He argues that the great platforms no longer function like firms in a market, but like feudal estates. We the users—and the small firms that sell through them—are a kind of serfs paying rent to the digital lord for access to the land. The American psychologist Shoshana Zuboff describes a related phenomenon she calls **surveillance capitalism**: data about your behaviour becomes raw material, and predictions about what you will do become merchandise. You may agree or disagree with Varoufakis and Zuboff. But think about what happens to Rand's ruler when it faces these platforms. Rand asked for a wall to keep the state out of the economy. She never imagined that economic actors could themselves become a kind of state, without passing through the state at all. Rand's defenders would rightly reply that the essential difference remains: no one forces you to use a platform, whereas the state can force you to pay taxes. That's a serious argument. But ask yourself honestly, as a teenager in 2026: how free are you not to be on the platform where all your friends are, where your school posts the timetable, and through which you'll look for your first job? Here the ruler begins to tremble a little. And that is a good thing. A good instrument also shows you where it no longer measures precisely. --- ## **Who Calibrated the Ruler?** I return to my father's workshop, to those polished steel blocks. A micrometer that reads wrongly is more dangerous than no micrometer at all. Without an instrument, you know that you don't know, and you're careful. With a decalibrated instrument, you have perfect confidence in a false number. The mechanic who cuts a part according to a faulty micrometer cuts it with total self-assurance. And ruins it. The same question must be asked of any ruler we use to measure society: **who calibrated it?** Take the Heritage index we used above. It's a serious instrument, with a public methodology and comparable data going back decades. But it was built by an American institute with a clear political orientation: favourable to the free market and a smaller state. That doesn't make it a liar. It makes it **calibrated to a particular zero**. Its premise is that less state means more freedom. If you accept the premise, the index is excellent. If you don't, the index will always hand you a verdict it decided in advance. Here's an example showing how calibration works. On the government-spending component of the 2026 index, the top five places are held by Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and New Zealand. Strange, no? Finland, Norway and Sweden are famous precisely for their generous welfare states. The explanation lies in the technical way that particular scale is constructed—and that is exactly the lesson: **a number on a ruler says something about the ruler, not only about the thing measured.** The Italian economist Luigi Zingales makes a distinction that helps you see more clearly. One thing is to be **pro-market**—to want open competition, equal rules for everyone, and free entry to the market for anyone. Another is to be **pro-business**—to want what suits the firms that already exist. The two are easily confused, but often opposed. Big firms, once they've reached the top, have every interest in closing the door behind them. And they will often ask the state to do it for them. That is why the ruler must be used in both directions. A ruler that measures only the state's entry into the economy will tell you that a country run by a few very powerful firms, which have bought the right laws, is very "free", because the state looks small. In fact, the state isn't small. It's simply rented out. I'm not telling you to distrust indices. I'm telling you to do what my father did with the micrometer: **check the instrument against the standard before you cut**. Ask who built the measurement, what they took as zero, and what they left out. --- ## **The Measurement Made at Home** All the figures above are national. But I don't live in "Romania" in the abstract. I live in Botoșani, in the north-east of the country, in Moldavia.* And from here, the ruler looks different. In a city like ours, the state isn't an abstraction from the news. For many families, it is the **employer**: the hospital, the school, the town hall, the prefecture, the county directorates. And for many private firms, it is the **main client**: the one buying services, works and equipment through public tenders. In this situation, the ruler's two directions are no longer separate. They overlap on every street. The same institution that regulates your business is also your customer. The same person you vote for also signs your contract. That isn't necessarily corruption. Most of the time it's simply economic geography: where the private market is small, the state occupies the space left free. But it is exactly the kind of entanglement Rand warned corrupts both sides. And now I have to be honest with you, because otherwise this text would have no right to sit on this site. My firm, a web agency here in Botoșani, works, among other things, for public institutions. We build websites, ensure compliance with cybersecurity regulations, produce content for town halls, schools and other institutions. If I place Rand's ruler against myself, what do I see? I see **a graduation**. Not a scandalous one. We work through legal procedures, with public contracts, for real services the institutions would have to buy from someone anyway. But a graduation nonetheless. Part of my firm's existence depends on the state being present in the economy. In a Randian absolute-zero world, my public clients would not exist. I'm not telling you this to accuse myself, nor to absolve myself. I'm telling you because it's the ruler's most important lesson: **it doesn't measure only others**. It's very easy to take an idea like Rand's and use it as a stick to beat the state, the politicians, "the system". It's much harder—and much more useful—to turn it on yourself and see where you stand. Each of us occupies a place on this ruler: through our parents' jobs, through the scholarship we receive, through the firm we'll work for, through the taxes we'll pay. Whoever measures only others isn't using a ruler. They're using a weapon. --- ## **What You Do with the Ruler** Suppose you've made it this far. What do you concretely do with everything you've read? I propose three questions you can put to any political or economic idea that appears in front of you: in the news, on social media, in a conversation at the table, in a campaign speech. They are, if you like, the ruler's three main graduations. **First question: which direction does it measure?** When someone complains about "too much state", ask whether they're also looking at the economy entering the state. When someone complains about "greedy corporations", ask whether they're also looking at the state entering the economy. Almost all political discourse measures in a single direction. The honest kind measures in both. **Second question: where is the zero point?** Every political argument has, hidden inside it, a zero point—an image of the ideal world against which it judges reality. For Rand, zero is the minimal state. For a socialist, zero is a society without inequality. For a religious conservative, it might be a community united around faith. There is nothing wrong with having a zero point. What's wrong is not declaring it, and pretending you judge "objectively", when in fact you are measuring against an ideal you haven't spoken out loud. **Third question: who calibrated the instrument?** When you see a statistic, a ranking or an index, ask who made it, with what money, and on what premises. Not in order to reject it automatically, but so you know what it truly measures. An economic-freedom ranking made by a pro-market institute and an inequality ranking made by a left-wing organisation can both be technically correct—and tell completely different stories about the same country. If you make a habit of asking these three questions, something strange happens. You become harder to manipulate, but you don't become cynical. You don't end up believing "they all lie". You end up understanding that each measures with a different ruler—and that you can compare the rulers themselves. And one more thing, perhaps the most important. These questions work in the opposite direction too—on the ideas *you* like. Especially on those. It's easy to apply the ruler to ideas you disagree with. The real test is applying it to the ideas that thrill you, that seem obvious, that you'd want to share immediately on a black background with white letters. --- ## **The Well-Sweep** I began with a workshop. I want to end with a well. If you've ever been to the countryside, in Moldavia, you've seen a **well-sweep**: a tall post with a long pole resting on it, swaying up and down. At one end hangs the bucket. At the other is a counterweight—usually a large stone or a lump of iron. The principle is brilliantly simple: the weight balances the bucket, so you can draw water from the depths without breaking your back. The name says it all. In Romanian, *cumpănă* (well-sweep) shares its root with *a cumpăni*: to weigh, to balance, to judge carefully. And the sweep works only if the two ends are in equilibrium. If the weight is too heavy, the bucket flies up and never comes down. If it's too light, the bucket drags everything into the well. It seems to me a better image than Jefferson's wall for the relationship between state and economy—at least for the real world, not the ideal one. The wall assumes total separation: each on its own side. The well-sweep assumes an unavoidable link, one you must keep adjusting. And the sweep has a fulcrum—the post in the middle—which neither of the two sides can move. That, perhaps, would be the rule of law: the equal rules that neither the state can change at will, nor the rich can buy. Ayn Rand would probably reject the image. She wanted the wall, not the sweep. And she has the right to her vision. But even if I choose the sweep, I need her wall. Without the image of a complete separation, I wouldn't know how heavily each end weighs. Rand's wall is the standard against which I check my sweep. --- ## **The Answer I Owed** I've come back to my son's question at the table: *"Would things be better that way?"* I could tell him more than "I don't know" now. I'd say something like this. Ayn Rand's idea was born of a real injustice—the sealed pharmacy of her father—and it names a real danger: a state that decides everything in the economy becomes a state that decides everything in your life. It deserves to be taken seriously—not laughed at, and not shared without thinking. In its pure form, the idea has existed nowhere, and Rand knew it. That doesn't make it useless. It makes it a **standard**, a zero point against which you can measure any real world—including your own. And the standard, if you use it honestly, shows you two things, not one: how deeply the state has entered the economy, and how deeply the economy has entered the state. Whoever shows you only one of the two measurements is, in fact, selling you half a ruler. Would things be better that way? I still don't know. But I know how to find out—for every law, every promise, and every beautiful quotation on Instagram. You measure twice, once in each direction. And only then do you cut. --- ### **Author's Note** This text was written with assistance in research, structuring and editing, in line with the transparency policy I apply to all my publications. The ideas, the framework and the responsibility are mine. **Main sources:** Ayn Rand, *The Virtue of Selfishness* (1964) and *Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal* (1966); "Introducing Objectivism" (1962), available on the Atlas Society website; *Atlas Shrugged*, Editura Cartier; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry "Ayn Rand"; Max Weber, "Objectivity in the Social Sciences" (1904); George Stigler, "The Theory of Economic Regulation" (1971); Heritage Foundation, *2026 Index of Economic Freedom*; Transparency International, *Corruption Perceptions Index 2025*; Yanis Varoufakis, *Technofeudalism* (2023); Shoshana Zuboff, *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism* (2019); Luigi Zingales, *A Capitalism for the People* (2012). --- **Cultural note: Moldavia here refers to the historical region of north-eastern Romania (not the Republic of Moldova), of which Botoșani is the principal city. The well-sweep (cumpănă) remains a familiar sight in rural Romania; its name carries the double meaning of "balance" and "judgement" in Romanian, which the article's closing metaphor depends upon.*