Ayn Rand Was Right: Wealthy Are on Strike Against Obama

Big Government ^ | June 21, 2011 | Wayne Allyn Root

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

The U.S. economy is crumbling. Businesses are collapsing in record numbers. Jobs have disappeared. Tax revenues are down dramatically. Coincidence?

Everything happening today under Obama resembles the storyline of Ayn Rand’s famous book, Atlas Shrugged, one of the most popular books of all time, selling over 7 million copies. Now, under President Obama, Atlas Shrugged has come to life. Rand prophesized a country dominated by socialists, Marxists and statists, where looters, free loaders and poverty promoters live off the productive class. To rationalize the fleecing of innovative business owners and job creators, the looter class demonized the wealthy, just as Obama and his socialist cabal are doing in real life today.

The central plot of Atlas Shrugged is that in response to being demonized, over-taxed, over-regulated, and punished for success, America’s business owners were disappearing — dropping off the grid, and refusing to work 16-hour days to support those unwilling to put in the same blood, sweat and tears. They were going on strike. Because of that the original proposed title of “Atlas Shrugged” was “The Strike.”

They were going on strike to teach that civilization cannot survive when people are slaves to government. That without a productive class of innovative business owners willing to risk their own money and work 16-hour days, weekends and holidays, there are no jobs and no taxes to pay for government. If you punish the wealthy, the risk-takers, the innovators, you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. In Obama’s America, fiction is becoming fact.

The lesson of Atlas Shrugged is that without the $100,000+ earners paying into Social Security, there are no pensions for the poor and lower middle class. Without the wealthy owners of million-dollar mansions paying $25,000 and $50,000 annual property tax bills, there is no funding for public schools. Without the wealthy paying into Medicare, there is no “free” healthcare for the elderly. Without capitalists motivated by profit, there are no discoveries to eradicate polio or create miraculous cancer and AIDS drugs. Without capitalists motivated by profit, there are no jobs, period! That is what happens when the producers of society go on strike to protect themselves from the looters.

Ayn Rand was warning the looters that there are consequences to their overzealous actions. She was warning that if the productive classes felt used, demonized, ripped off, and taken for granted, they would go on strike — stop working, retire early, go underground, or move to places where achievement is celebrated and they feel appreciated.

The latest U.S. Census proves Ayn Rand right. Under Obama the wealthy are striking, voting with their feet. They are moving to low-tax red states in droves, escaping from high-tax blue states where they are being demonized and punished by the millions.

The Census proves that Obama’s tax and spend philosophy is a dismal failure, an economic disaster killing jobs. It is no coincidence that 1.9 million FEWER Americans are working than before Obama’s stimulus. It is no coincidence that jobs are not returning to the private sector. It is no coincidence that tax revenues have dropped dramatically and cannot support Obama’s bloated Big Brother government. The innovators, risk-takers, and wealthy he demonized and punished are on strike.

The high tech revolution has killed the progressive-liberal tax-and-spend dream. Because of the Internet, email, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Satellite TV, I-phones, I-pads, and cell phones, business owners are no longer prisoners of Big Brother. Take a look at states where the latest Census shows Americans moved during the past decade: Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alaska, Virginia — all low- or no-tax red states, states that lead the USA in economic freedom.

Now look at states they escaped from: New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan. Taxpayers, business owners, jobs creators, retirees with assets are fleeing the high tax, big spending, Big Brother states — the states being run like Obama is running the nation.

Progressives be afraid, be very afraid. If Obama is re-elected, these valuable producers will pick up and leave America altogether. There is a big world out there begging them to come. Places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Monte Carlo, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Bahamas, and Cayman Islands are low-tax havens that appreciate business owners and their sacrifices. They welcome wealthy ex-patriots. They celebrate individual achievement. They reward instead of punish business owners and financial risk-takers. They are wonderful places to live and are aggressively pursuing Americans.

I am just one small businessman, a third-party Libertarian political leader. Yet I personally have heard from thousands of fans, friends and supporters who have left America, are thinking of leaving America, are visiting other countries right now to decide where to go, or making preparations to leave in case Obama is re-elected. Just as Ayn Rand predicted, business owners are going on strike. Permanently.

The high tech revolution has freed them to run their businesses from anywhere in the world. The same high tech tools and toys that toppled a powerful and invincible 30-year dictator in Egypt and now threaten to topple powerful leaders throughout the Arab world, also offer mobility and freedom to U.S. taxpayers. Obama better learn the lesson of Mubarek before millions more business people decide they do not need to put up with looters, free loaders, and politicians who despise them.

Atlas is shrugging. Ayn Rand is saying “I told you so.”

[C. Edmund Wright]

>> The present corporate strategy is static and profitable rather than dynamic and risky. Cash is for keeping rather then investing in hoped for growth....<<

You are correct, it is a “going Galt” hybrid plan but it’s being done for the same reasons. This is why so much “cash is on the sidelines” and why Bernanke remains clueless as to why. He, like all academic theoreticians, does not understand the motivations and preservation instincts of companies, public or private. Flooding the system with money has not dulled those instincts like he thought it would.

[wintertime]

There are folks on this forum, as far as I know, who are indeed “going Galt.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I am one of them. I refuse to be half ( or more) of a slave to the government!

[IronJack]

Well said.

We won’t solve this by replacing a socialist with a pseudo-socialist. We need to evolve the model right back to one that favors the individual over the collective. In other words, to the model the Founders envisioned ... and rightfully thought they’d ensured.

[Art in Idaho]

Where Rand was right, however, is that change must be systemic; that is, a change in the Presidency will not suffice even if the choice is other than Tweedledum and Tweedledee. A change in Congress is a little closer but still entirely insufficient. What is necessary is a change in government such that the centralization of control no longer offers a means for a small ruling class to enrich itself, for those who direct no longer to be able to be separate from those who produce - that is the foundation of Rand's utopia. No one has ever quite managed it, but the Founders came as close as anyone ever has. A desire to return to their principles is not merely a flight of nostalgia beloved of conservatives, but a recognition that it was a far more effective model for releasing human creativity and productivity than the stifling regulatory state that gradually displaced it. That is, after all, what "Liberty" really means.

My wife the other day in her infinite wisdom said, "What Palin wants is a new government." I think all of us are sensing that is what's really needed if America is going to survive - back to what The Founders envisioned. May God guide Sarah and help us all. . . tough times ahead. Pray and persevere.

[tutstar]

bfl

[I see my hands]

"it takes a very long time, as the still-running automobiles of Detroit's great years attest in Cuba"

No one is torching the still running autos in Cuba. You're right, it won't/can't go down like in the book. There is no gulch, there are revolutions. Teach your children.

[bert]

——Bernanke remains clueless -—

There are a host of players including Republicans.

I wonder if Bernake is merely acting out his part and is not really being truthful. He is doing his part to promote controlled inflation/devaluation

[C. Edmund Wright]

>> I wonder if Bernake is merely acting out his part and is not really being truthful. He is doing his part to promote controlled inflation/devaluation >>

I rather think he’s a clueless academic theoretician who does not understand how human nature and natural motivations / disincentives dictate how people will act far more than a money supply equation.

[justiceseeker93]

Since I'm not much of a fiction buff, I'll reserve comment on this interesting comparison between the Obama economy and Atlas Shrugged.

But there is a real world comparison to be made between today's economic picture and the 1930s Depression era under the regime of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt, like Obama, entered office in hard economic times (although March 1933 was much worse than Jan. 2009 by any economic measurement). Roosevelt's early ears in office featured increased personal income tax rates (top rate raised to 79%), a new non-distributed corporate profits tax, a new Social Security tax, and hefty increases in federal excise taxes that already existed plus entirely new ones. Some of Roosevelt's make work New Deal projects resembled Obama's stimulus projects. The value of the dollar under Roosevelt was deliberately decreased, although by a different means than today. The "wealthy" were constantly lambasted by Roosevelt, just as they are by Obama and his henchmen. And just like today, the net result was little or no overall improvement over a prolonged period.

[Eleutheria5]

Roosevelt did one thing smart, though. Even while he was spending like a drunken sailor, he was putting the dollar on a strong footing, backed by gold, which was no longer traded and speculated. That way, though the dollar was seriously devalued, it had a mechanism to bring it back. Obama, however, is not interested in doing the same. So the dollar is no longer the world currency it once was.

[W. W. SMITH]

There is a father and son not far from me, son in mid twenties. Both are members of Mensa with seven business’s between them. The business’s are all shut down. They have reduced their economic foot print to the minimum.

They each have a tattoo on their back below the left shoulder.

I AM JOHN GALT

[listenhillary]

Do you understand that there are more people that are in the wagon than there people pulling the wagon?

There is an estimated 13 to 15 trillion dollars in offshore banks consisting of corporate profits that would be taxed twice if brought back and invested in the USA. Taxed once in the original country earned and if brought back to the US, they would be taxed again by the US. There are hardly any other countries that do this.

We have the highest corporate tax of all of our major trading partners. We are an inhospitable country to do business in. We are paying the price.

Imagine that the legal hurdles/harassment, union thugs, high corporate taxes and double taxation were removed in America. We would see a renaissance of new investment in America with companies and wealthy beating down our doors to invest in our economy. Enact a flat consumption tax instead of income and corporate taxes and stand back.

What is sad is that it is likely other countries that will enact low flat taxes for individuals and corporations and that is where the producers and productive will migrate. We are just too damned stupid and elect politicians that are too damned stupid to change course.

[listenhillary]

Didn’t make it through the web page you linked. He needs a cliff’s note version.

This caught my eye

“In 1981, the Reagan administration rolled back some of the success-punitive, anti-privacy laws and tax rates that were contributing to this exodus and indications are that it did have a significant effect. In fact, officially, not a single US citizen renounced his US citizenship the next year.

That statement deserves repeating.

Not a single US citizen renounced his US citizenship the next year - not one.

[lentulusgracchus]

it should really read “Productive” or more accurately yet, “Wealth-Builders”

And wealth-builders perforce include many members of the middle class and UMC who would like to leave something to their children, if not become more comfortable than they are.

[vlad335]

All the while the left is shouting from the rooftops “tax the rich, make them pay their fair share!”

[lentulusgracchus]

Thank you. I appreciate that. His post sounded like Socialism 101 to me.

Not at all. It was a simple observation that, for business to prosper, there must be money in circulation, i.e. being passed around among more than just a few people.

Example: Let's say M3 is a sum of money X. In one economy, people are buying and selling, and nobody owns more than, say, 0.4% of M3, and the vast majority, a tiny fraction of that.

In the other economy, M3 is the same, but it's all held in one account. One guy owns all the money in the world. That's a dead economy, full of dead people, and the sole owner of all that money is fishing for his own dinner, since there's nobody left for him to work with or sell to. Capiche? It's not an unreasonable observation. Everyone is better off in a growing, busy economy and society, not a wealth-storage economy in which Mr. Big holds all the value and dispenses it with tweezers, never lending or investing and never buying more than enough to meet his own needs.

[Publius]

If you ever want to compare fiction with current events, check out these threads.

FReeper Book Club: Introduction to Atlas Shrugged
Part I, Chapter I: The Theme
Part I, Chapter II: The Chain
Part I, Chapter III: The Top and the Bottom
Part I, Chapter IV: The Immovable Movers
Part I, Chapter V: The Climax of the d’Anconias
Part I, Chapter VI: The Non-Commercial
Part I, Chapter VII: The Exploiters and the Exploited
Part I, Chapter VIII: The John Galt Line
Part I, Chapter IX: The Sacred and the Profane
Part I, Chapter X: Wyatt’s Torch
Part II, Chapter I: The Man Who Belonged on Earth
Part II, Chapter II: The Aristocracy of Pull
Part II, Chapter III: White Blackmail
Part II, Chapter IV: The Sanction of the Victim
Part II, Chapter V: Account Overdrawn
Part II, Chapter VI: Miracle Metal
Part II, Chapter VII: The Moratorium on Brains
Part II, Chapter VIII: By Our Love
Part II, Chapter IX: The Face Without Pain or Fear or Guilt
Part II, Chapter X: The Sign of the Dollar
Part III, Chapter I: Atlantis
Part III, Chapter II: The Utopia of Greed
Part III, Chapter III: Anti-Greed
Part III, Chapter IV: Anti-Life
Part III, Chapter V: Their Brothers’ Keepers
Part III, Chapter VI: The Concerto of Deliverance
Part III, Chapter VII: “This is John Galt Speaking”
Part III, Chapter VIII: The Egoist
Part III, Chapter IX: The Generator
Part III, Chapter X: In the Name of the Best Within Us
Coda: Ten Years After
Afterword and Suggested Reading

[TigersEye]

That doesn’t resemble the content of his post at all.

[lentulusgracchus]

We do alot of bartering and are big into coupons and other alternate forms of payment methods

Expect a hostile audit. If you come to the attention of Obama's political droolers, they will send the flying monkeys.

[TigersEye]

Capiche?