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Permalink Reply by Count of Monte Cristo on March 7, 2009 at 12:17

Go Galt you mean... :-) Just started reading Atlas Shrugged last week. Some of the similarities between that book and today's society are striking. It will really seem similar if all of the planned tax increases go through in 2011. There really is a war on the producers and the private sector going on in our country today...

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Permalink Reply by Jay Murrell on March 7, 2009 at 13:34

Galt. You right. My bad.

John Kennedy passed a tax cut in 1962 revenues went up. Things worked out the same way when Reagan cut taxes in the early 80's. Obama and the Dem leaders in Congress think that all they need to do is pass a tax increase and shazzam, nobody will change their habits and revenues flow into the Federal treasury. We'll see.

Depending on how radical this budget turns out to be, I can see some astoundingly negative consequences for all of us.


Many people will cut back. Why bust your butt to pay for somebody else's health insurance, mortgage, free ride, etc., etc.

Screw that!! I’ll sit down.

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Permalink Reply by Jay Murrell on March 7, 2009 at 15:32

From the New York Times:

The right has a new hero to lead the Tea Party revolts Rick Santelli started: John Galt.

According to the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, sales of Atlas Shrugged hit an all-time high last year, and have “almost tripled” in the first seven weeks of 2009 against last year.

Michelle Malkin is the Norma Rae of this Galt moment, walking the virtual shop floors of the country’s “wealth producers,” but instead of “Strike!” her sign reads “Going Galt!”

In her syndicated column this week, Malkin explains:

While they take to the streets politically, untold numbers of America’s wealth producers are going on strike financially. Dr. Helen Smith, a Knoxville forensic pathologist and political blogger, dubbed the phenomenon “Going Galt” last fall. It’s a reference to the famed Ayn Rand novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” in which protagonist John Galt leads the entrepreneur class to cease productive activities in order to starve the government of revenue. (Not coincidentally, Rand’s novel sales are up and John Galt references punctuated many of the Tea Party demonstrations.)

Wait. John Galt?

If you need a refresh, here’s a semi-snarky one courtesy of Tristero at Hullabaloo:

John Galt is the copper-haired, white-boy protagonist in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Galt leads a revolutionary movement in which all the top leaders of the banks and corporations forsake their corporate jets and perks to work in diners or as subway repair guys. No they weren’t fired by Galt. Rather, Galt urged them to go on strike and withdraw their expertise from an increasingly socialist world. Deprived of the genius of their genius, the world economy collapses.

Who exactly is thinking about Going Galt? Lisa Schifferen at The Corner has the rundown:

The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant “up or out” policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today — in their peak earning years. Their work ethic is prodigious, and . . . in their spare time they sit on the boards of most of the complex charities and arts institutions that provide aid and pay for culture in America. No group of people contribute more to their community. And now the president, who followed a path sort of like that, and who claims that his wife’s former six-figure income was a result of precisely such qualifications and efforts, is demonizing them. More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.

So, what happens when the heart surgeons, dentists, litigators, and people who employ 10 or 20 other people in their mid-size businesses decide that they don’t want to pay for the excessive, pointless spending that the president finds so compelling? Instapundit speculates on people “going John Galt.” I think golf — a time-intensive sport that the hard-working have eschewed for the past decade or two because it took too long — will make a comeback.

But wait before booking a month-of-Sundays worth of tee times right way. “I don’t think that we will see a mass exodus of productive people to secret hideouts,” writes Megan McArdle at the Atlantic.

I look to Atlas Shrugged more for conveniently totable beach reading than an economic blueprint. What’s interesting to me, though, is how many details Rand did get right — like the markets in “unfreezing” Ukrainian bank deposits, so similar to the frozen railroad bonds of Atlas Shrugged. Or the cascading and unanticipated failures, with government officials racing to slap another fix on to fix the last failing solution. If only the people in her novels had acted remotely like actual people, rather than comic book characters, I, too, would be rereading the thing now.

At the American Scene, Conor Friedersdorf agrees that the novel has “aesthetic shortcomings” and “the ideas animating it are ultimately flawed” but argues that it is still worth reading:

I’d point out that we read all sorts of people — Marx, Rousseau and Freud come to mind — whose worldviews are disastrous if taken as gospel, but nevertheless useful for all sorts of keen insights that help us to better understand the world, so long as they are separated from the flawed frameworks of their originators.

Anyone grappling with altruism, capitalism, or the just distribution of wealth ought to read Atlas Shrugged, for although the particular philosophy its author espouses is ultimately wrongheaded, the way she grapples with those issues — originally, audaciously, intelligently and uncompromisingly — helps us to think them through ourselves, to assimilate her best insights, and to reach better conclusions than would otherwise be possible.

Will Wilkinson is a bit more skeptical about the phenomenon:

I can’t help but feel that threatening to withdraw from economic production, ala Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt, is a certain kind of libertarian-conservative’s version of progressives threatening to move to Canada. For my part, I can’t imagine what would make me want to stop working, and each new president makes me want to move to Canada.

Despite my own inclinations, I’m among those who believe that labor supply is pretty sensitive to marginal tax rates, and I have no doubt that increasing the top marginal rate will make it so that some very productive people will quite rationally choose to produce less. . . .

But insofar as this is all about taxes on the wealthy . . . it’s a bit hard to see tax rates somewhat exceeding the Clinton era’s as a move over some inflection point from the tolerable to the completely outrageous. And of course none of these folks designed an engine that would have created basically free energy (and made global warming a non-issue). In the individual case, “going Galt” smacks of a kind self-aggrandizement in the same way that climate smuggery does. Because, really, your marginal contribution doesn’t matter that much.

Wilkinson ends his post by point out, oh by the way, the point of the novel is “not that you are John Galt.”

The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. You’re smart, hardworking, productive, and true. But you’re no creative genius and you take innovation — John Galt — for granted. You don’t even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks.

Brad DeLong has a different observation he wants to share with Galt’s conservative fans. “John Galt is not a Christian,” he writes, citing this passage from the novel:

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge — he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil — he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor — he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire — he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy — all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors they they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was — that robot, in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love — he was not man…

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Permalink Reply by Jay Murrell on March 8, 2009 at 0:28

Jim:

What about all of the new taxes he is proposing on businesses large and small?

JM

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Permalink Reply by sesport on March 8, 2009 at 0:51

Now, I had a humorous thought about this last paragraph ...in particulsr ...

"Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge — he acquired a mind and became a rational being."

Who was it that delivered man from being the robot? Who offered him the opportunity to evolve and acquire a mind and become a rational being?

Sidetracking, I know, but the humorous thought did occur to me. LOL

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Permalink Reply by Jay Murrell on March 8, 2009 at 1:33

Ses,

When you Google Brad DeLong you learn that he is an economics prof that UC Berkley and is a former Clinton Administration appointee in the Treasury Department.

In light of the fact that he's an economist, is it instructive to note that his criticism of Ayn Rand's philosophy centers on the fact that she was not a Christian?

As a Roman Catholic I embrace the Church's view of original sin: original sin as the general condition of sinfulness (lack of holiness) into which human beings are born, distinct from the actual sins that a person commits. It explicitly states that original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants.

That said, isn't it odd that an economist would choose Rand's atheism and not her central premise on individualism, or, there is a producer class that creates all wealth?

Atlas Shrugged is not a holy tome. I don't have to embrace her views on Christianity to support and advocate for her other arguments.

The conclusion that I draw regarding DeLong is that he is attempting to tie Rand's atheism around the neck of her economic argument. It's a canard.

Best,

Jay

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Permalink Reply by sesport on March 8, 2009 at 2:26

As I said, it was a sidetracked thought that occurred to me.

Now to your question, I suppose an economist could have a faith ... could follow a religious doctrine or catechism ... apparently, that particular passage "spoke" to DeLong as he chose to comment on it. I don't see how that particular citation proves Galt's atheism ... personally I find it to be a spiritually moving soliloquy(? I think it is that).

How Rand's atheism negates the economic agrument put forth ... I'm not seeing it. I can't say that the two are inextricably tied. I do agree, however, that one doesn't have to embrace her religious views in order to feel a "kin" with her premise. Not to say that I agree with it.

I'll save commenting on original sin for another time, although it is Sunday. lol I just can't for the life of me understand how an infant that is delivered into this world as a blessing can be tagged as being without holiness.

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Permalink Reply by Jay Murrell on March 8, 2009 at 3:45

KB:

Only if he loves money...:-)

Money is just another tool, carpenters use hammers and saws to build, entrepreneurs use money.

JM

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Permalink Reply by Jay Murrell on March 7, 2009 at 15:59

Now this guy gets it right...:-)

So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
- Francisco d'Anconia (Atlas Shrugged)

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Permalink Reply by Two Dogs, Pirate on March 7, 2009 at 16:21

Told to you by Jay?

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Permalink Reply by Jay Murrell on March 8, 2009 at 0:15

Well, you have a point. Let me ask though, would the workers have a job if it were not for capital?

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Permalink Reply by Jay Murrell on March 8, 2009 at 3:38

KB:

Assume entrepreneurs are motivated by profit. Assume that high risk ventures can, if successful, yield high profit. What do you suppose happens if the margin of profit is reduced by higher non productive costs? Call these costs taxes.

Is it fair to conclude that if the entrepreneur eschews, because of higher costs, risk that there is the risk that there will be no labor for the workers to perform (with the entrepreneur on their back … :-)

Your thoughts?

JM

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