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 ...
They didn't in the novel, not really. Francisco d'Anconia abandoned his people in Mexico. Midas Mulligan at least made a clean exit. What happened when Ellis Wyatt's oil workers woke up that morning to find their fields aflame and the boss taking a powder is not recorded.
It's definitely an issue. In fiction Rand personalized the whole thing to the point where an attack on Wyatt Oil or Reardon Industries was distilled into an attack on only one man. Taggart Transcontinental's employees are listless no-loads in one part of the book and loyal, armed guardians in another. It's an issue I'm not sure Rand really resolved, one we'll be following chapter by chapter as we go through the book.
As I was reading those blog comments by the lefties I kept thinking I was at the part early in the book with Hank Rearden and Dagny at the party at Hank’s house when the anti-capitalists were talking about the evils of men in their very pretty, elevated, elitist language. It was truly creeping me out...I could hear Hank’s brother speaking...
Of course “Atlas Shrugged” doesn’t fit perfectly with our society 60 years after it was written. It isn’t meant to -but it does demonstrate the power of the human spirit that exists so beautifully in some of us.
It strikes me as hilarious that libs can talk about how some people are born gay or born some such way that justfies their standards or morality, but when someone is born to be a leader and producer in our capitalist system then that person must surely be a greedy bastard deserving of nothing but scorn. Nice.
Seeing that Bamsy distilled the attack on the GOP and conservatives into an ideological assault on a single radio announcer, something that I think even Rand would have strained at swallowing, that doesn’t sound so far-fetched now.
An attack on Rush is an attack on Mr. Snerdly. (Doffs hat, places over heart...) :-)
There are a several ways to go Galt. Check this out, I had never heard of it, but it sounds like a step in the right direction because it starves the beast by repealing the 16th amendment and there already seems to be a movement. There are currently nine States which have already endorsed the Liberty Amendment. They are: Wyoming (’59) • Nevada (’60) • Texas (’60) • Louisiana (’60) • Georgia (’62) • South Carolina (’62) • Mississippi (’82) • Arizona (’82) • Indiana (’82) The sight is: http://zakklemmer.vox.com/library/post/the-liberty-amendment-to-repeal-the-16th-amendment.html I have also been seeking an alternative conservative party and 2010 may be the year to test the water on that front. I started reading up on the Libertarians but I’m not convinced???
Atlas Shrugged ping!
Actually, it’s really just a big con game. Everyone that is participating in the surrender of their freedoms is pretty much doing it voluntarily. We talk big, but are never really willing to do anything about it, and the rest are just fools who have been programmed since youth to go along with what ever the status quo tells them. If We The People would actually rise up at the local level and tell our governments what to do and make them take the orders and not the other way around, then we would get our freedom back, but no-one is doing that anymore. And btw, I think our founding fathers had it right with their hands on/DIY approach to government.
“I have also been seeking an alternative conservative party and 2010 may be the year to test the water on that front. I started reading up on the Libertarians but I’m not convinced???”
Libertarians great on economics. Great on social policy (it’s none of your business). Disappointed at the lack of courage on global warming. Wrong regarding open borders and military. Also disappointed in Libertarian choices for presidential candidates. So, I have been looking at other conservative parites: Constitution, etc as well as Repubs.
“I have also been seeking an alternative conservative party and 2010 may be the year to test the water on that front. I started reading up on the Libertarians but I’m not convinced???”
Libertarians great on economics. Great on social policy (it’s none of your business). Disappointed at the lack of courage on global warming. Wrong regarding open borders and military. Also disappointed in Libertarian choices for presidential candidates. So, I have been looking at other conservative parites: Constitution, etc as well as Repubs.
Existing businesses closing and new ones not opening.
For example, Cabellas was to open a new store in Denver.
The locals put up a fuss for years until approvals were finally given.
Now Cabellas is not going to build.
Thanks for the journey, george!
Yes, agree on the military stuff as well, on their website they kinda go off on them as not being concerned about the environment, but I know for a fact that most bases are kept pristine, so much so, that the land is coveted by developers, hunters, environmentalist, etc. Also,the Libertarians didn’t seem to have as much depth with respect to property rights, 2nd amendment, and anti-globalism...at least when compared to the Constitution Party. I have been talking to folks at the RNC as well, but they seem dazed and confused over there and its giving me an uneasy feeling. Thanks for your thoughts.
Good to hear from you.
I feel like we are slowly being boiled.. with no real escape.
I’m all for it, once we figure out what “it” is.
Yeah, Eddie did get screwed over, huh? Lifelong friend to Dagney and never made it to the gulch.
A man who hates the present set up and sees it as unworkable does not become our intellectual ally in any sense, by that fact alone. That fact is politically barren. It is dry tinder for demagogues, and not any basis of rational policy. By all means let's convince them. Don't pretend we already have, when all of this was plain as a pikestaff in November, and they still voted for the wrong people.
sorry, I have to pass.
It not a coincidence that most of their national leaders are nuttier than fruitcakes. - Their international policy is nuts.
Left the big time of letting people use my mind and creativity, closed my productive and (generally) highly profitable businesses and only took the occasional 'flunky' level jobs to learn stuff for my own education and skill learning.
Last year, for the first time since I was 12 years old, I made sure I had no legally taxable income.
All this started before Mr. Thompson Obama was elected President.
I'm currently building my own self sufficient mini-Gulch.
Homey don't play dis no mo.
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