Posted on 03/15/2009 7:12:05 PM PDT by george76
What is the breaking point? Where will the resistance form? Heavy questions, but unavoidable in the current political climate. The productive members of society can only be pushed so far, some say.
What they envision is not defiance of law or a reversal of the election. It is people's growing disengagement from a new economic order that punishes effort and rewards envy — the creepy future that Bill Ritter and Barack Obama intend for us.
Columnist Michelle Malkin calls that withdrawal "going Galt."
Malkin was the first speaker last weekend when several hundred Coloradans gathered for a free-market leadership conference in Colorado Springs. Her reference was to John Galt, the individualist hero of Ayn Rand's novel, "Atlas Shrugged." She told of seeing a placard at the protest rally for Obama's stimulus bill signing that warned: "Atlas will shrug."
So what, you ask. In human behavior, incentives matter. People are choosers, not automatons. Mess them over enough and they're out of here. All history proves it. "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." That bitter joke among Soviet factory drones sums up collectivism's ultimate failure wherever tried.
As ever more people ride in the wagon and fewer are left to pull it, there will come a breaking point. Crowding taxation onto the highest earners and debt onto our kids, as President Obama proposes, invites collapse.
Ignoring the constitution at will, as Gov. Bill Ritter and the spending lobby do, breeds contempt. Ruin must result.
Cold War victory taught us the power of ideas. The East crumbled when the West asserted the superiority of liberty, wakened by thinkers like F.A. Hayek with his expose of the road to serfdom and Frederic Bastiat with his ridicule of "everyone seeking to live at the expense of everyone else."
(Excerpt) Read more at denverpost.com ...
Or does it show what happens when you hold onto the "corpse" of capitalism that has been bled dry?
Eddie was too good. He never let go . My first read through I feared Dagney wouldn't let go either. She didn't until the bridge died.
Medicare and social security are the big financial messes headed our way.
The solutions available now ( if there was the will and there is not ) are awful.
In a few years...?
We try to explain this the next generations, but we can not understand it for them.
There is no one more hypocrital or intolerant than a liberal.
>> Or does it show what happens when you hold onto the “corpse” of capitalism that has been bled dry? Eddie was too good. He never let go . My first read through I feared Dagney wouldn’t let go either. She didn’t until the bridge died. <<
He was never contacted, was he? It wasn’t that he never would let go. Don’t try to read into it some grand purpose for Eddie into Rand; she wrote seductively brilliant prose, but throughout the book she never considered the world through Eddie’s eyes. But you are right: Eddie was TOO good to make it to Rand’s Rousseau village. What does that say about the internal consistency of Rand’s values?
>> Well, no. That didn’t happen in the book. One of our objectives in the FReeper Book Club’s study of this beast is to attempt to figure out exactly what she did expect to happen. I’m not ruling that prediction out, in fact I think it entirely possible, but it didn’t happen within the confines of the novel. <<
Actually, while we don’t know for certain that America experienced such massive deaths, we do know that India and China were experiencing deaths by the hundreds of millions by starvation and plague.
>> One difficulty with the thing is that Atlas doesn’t actually shrug within it, he only begins to. <<
Actually, that’s why some of the OTHER defenders that have written to me are nonsense: Atlas is already shrugging throughout the book. The capitalists withdraw, the economy collapses and the socialists take more power. The more the economy goes down, the more people rely on socialism. That’s part of what works in the book.
>> The pertinence of Atlas Shrugged to the moment is, at least for me, in the mechanism of that decay and fall. In that I think she’s disturbingly accurate. <<
Yes, I’ll agree that her criticism of socialism and do-gooderism is withering and accurate.
That is the one thing that has always bothered me about the book - Eddie was never invited to Galt’s Gulch even though he was held the same values and was equally as competent as Owen Kellogg.
>> Dude... read the book. It is precisely this type of nonsense that makes me question you. Great job leafing through the Cliff notes, <<
Are you always so absolutely conformist that you can’t imagine someone can read the same book you did and not come to the same conclusion you did unless they just skimmed the Cliff notes? What’s so ironic about this, of course, is that you are pitching the party line, and I’m the one pointing out the inconsistency of it.
LOL!
I like that one better! ;o)
That’s absolutely GREAT!
Thank you!
Consider it stolen, if I may. ;o)
BTW, I’m Going Galt at the beach tomorrow.
I can’t wait to get out of Obamaland.
1983- Hurricane Alicia-
Downtown Houston devastated with windows blown out of skyscrapers. Flood damage and lots of tornado damage. Lived in an apartment then. water ruined the carpet. Replace the following week. People we lived around banded together and shared food, water, ice, etc. A few problems, mainly price-gougers and a few fights over ice supplies, but we got through it fine. Some without power over 2 weeks.
2008-Hurricane Ike-
Lost part of a fence and a turbo vent. Got luckier than Alicia though. Same situation. Neighbors helped out. Friends from Galveston stayed with us for 2 weeks. My son and his freinds went around the neighborhood with drills and plywood and saws and held neighbors board up windows before hand and came back with chainsaws to cut up fallen leaves afterwords. They helped me out some, too.
The difference was in 1983, no FEMA.
In 2008, people were COMPLAINING 2 DAYS LATER, because FEMA hadn't arrived with MRE’s, water, and ice.
Everyone who lives here knows the basics, stock up on food, ice, water, batteries, etc., but for some reason that I can not fathom, several residents WAITED for FEMA to come give them EVERYTHING, and CRIED when they didn't do it FAST ENOUGH!
LOL.
Guilty as charged.
Here is a free book title: Going Gault in the Age of Obama; A how to guide.
Liberals melt down when this is pointed out to them. It's a truth of human nature they simply can't afford to admit.
Response: The Helots of ancient Sparta took quite a bit of abuse. There were very few, if any, Helot uprisings. The Roman slaves rebelled only once that I can remember. I waffle back and forth thinking one time people will fight. Then I go back to the doctrine teaching that as long as one gives the Anglo American his food, drink, drugs, copulation, a good bowel movement and a sound snore he will be quiet. Hard to say.
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