Thank you for posting the link!
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 ...
journey to Galt Gulch
BTTT
Once they get their force field goin’, there’s no stoppin’ ‘em.
The wimpified productive members of society are ignorant of government misconduct and can be pushed a lot farther.
Most of the country is productive, conservatives make a mistake if they don’t explain that socialism will reult in less for everyone. Rich, middle class and poor will all be worse off.
I found the comments after the article quite amusing. Some of the commenters, self-described liberals, made reference to their seeking to emigrate after the 2004 elections, but stayed here nonetheless. They then go on to say conservatives will become “Galt-like” and will withdraw into themselves. Those commenters could not be more qrong. We are not going to retreat into some shell ande shut out the rest of the world. We are, instead, going to take our country back, even if it means having to trod over the broken and decaying remains of the lunatic left.
grong = wrong
I hope the producers will remember their loyal workers when they go on strike.
This was in the Denver Post? Atlas is getting close with this Kenyan-born marxist usurper and the incredibly corrupt Washington DC & MSM.
The problem with “going Galt” is that there are plenty of incompetents out there willing to try to take over when John Galt throws down the reins.
Like in the auto industry: when the good engineers leave or retire, there’ll be plenty of EPA employees, the ones who couldn’t make it at the Big 3 or even as a waterboy for the Japanese at one of the transplants, willing to try to do real engineering work.
And it’ll be years before their lack of ability is seen for what it is, as opposed to something like the colossal mismanagement of GM or Chrysler.
Atlas isn’t just shrugging...Atlas is having a Grand Mal seizure...
“..over the broken and decaying remains of the lunatic left.”
Thanks for giving me a bright thought picture to envision.
sorry. I stink at posting links. They lit up the first time I tried to preview, don’t know what happened?
Thank you for posting the link!
I have felt him tremble.
Very good. Thanks for posting it.
“The East crumbled when the West asserted the superiority of liberty”
+ + +
Liberty!
That’s our rallying cry.
John Andrews is director of the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University
A viable alternative to the cash system will have to emerge. Go Gault all you want, you still need to eat. Any Gault’s Gulch will have to be virtual because every inch of soil can come under mamma guv’mint’s great hog-fat sway.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2203589/posts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHvTy_fVdJ8
I have been working on a transition from corporate employment to small business. A good conservative CPA can help a small business really starve the marxist beast of revenue!
What the Libtards do not realize is that as we reduce what we earn there is less to tax, meaning less revenue for government. As we spend less, there is less taxes to be collected from sales. The deficits will increase. The problems will grow.
The Libtards don’t know this as they don’t know that cutting taxes increases revenue through incentives to earn more. We don’t work for the benefit of government or our lazy fellow citizens on the government teet.
Let them learn the lesson the hard way.
A debt of gratitude to you techno geek! I promise to have my son give me a lesson on how to post links properly, and a kind person sent me an email on how to do so as well.
I can type fast, but that is because I learned on a typewriter in HS, LOL.
Thanks again, FRiend!
Absolutely required reading. Many times posted about and discussed here 10-years ago.
The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the writings of the Founding Fathers and these two gentlemen are all that are needed when the time comes to throw off gentle serfdom and re-establish a Constitutional Republic based on freedom and liberty.
Great bumper sticker ping!
Classical Athens lasted about 170 years. This may be all that we can do as Americans before sinking into the mire of typical governmental tyranny that most of the world has faced since the Sumerians built their first city.
In a thousand years, someone might emerge with the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and wonder about us and examine what went wrong.
the Cloward-Piven Strategy
Didn't work out too well for Eddie.
There have been threads on idle containers and rail cars this week. A fair amount of Asia to Europe cargo passes into west coast U.S. ports, travels by train to the east coast, then is carried on ships to Europe. Even that traffic is down. The cheap shipping on container ships is what makes Asian manufacturing viable by giving them access to the world market. The world isn't buying right now.
It was easy to believe the conservative pitch when it was plausible that all could get rich that way. At the moment, that seems like a cynical lie to half the country. It wasn't and isn't, but that is what it looks like to men who have lost fortunes. So they are simply sunk in pessimism.
They don't believe the old song and dance that all can get rich throwing money at the NASDAQ. They don't believe the older song and dance that everyone can get rich off Uncle Sugar. They don't believe much of anything, frankly. They just sink into gloom.
"You are all going to die because you didn't listen to me" doesn't get them hopping. They think "yes on one and no on two", and sink deeper into gloom.
The cure has to be a lot more upbeat than this, without lacking realism.
But it did for the brakeman. And Eddie chose to stay with the train, he wasn’t abandoned.
I don't think so. Here in Kalifornia there just isn't going to be enough revenue to satisfy all those who expect the state to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. Massive numbers of public employees are going to be plenty disappointed. They are due some realism and there will be nothing "upbeat" about it.
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.
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