Category Archives: John Galt

John Galt, Part II

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I wrote about John Galt in 2009. It seems appropriate to discuss the concepts of Ayn Rand‘s book again.  Atlas Shrugged will be released across the country in April.  The unions and collectivists are already preparing protests. 

The concepts of put forth by Rand are appearing in real life.  Productive people are leaving the states run by “moochers” and moving to states that allow them to retain their personal freedoms.

Thomas Sowell, writing in the Investors Business Daily, notes the flight of “Galts” as revealed in the 2010 census.

Mass Migration Of America’s Golden Geese

By THOMAS SOWELL Posted 03/28/2011 05:59 PM ET

The latest published data from the 2010 census show how people are moving from place to place within the United States.
In general, people are voting with their feet against places where the liberal, welfare-state policies favored by the intelligentsia are most deeply entrenched.
When you break it down by race and ethnicity, it is all too painfully clear what is happening. Both whites and blacks are leaving California, the poster state for the liberal, welfare-state and nanny-state philosophy.
Whites are also fleeing the big Northeastern liberal, welfare states like Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as the same kinds of states in the Midwest, such as Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.
Although California has long been a prime destination of Asian immigrants and the homes of their descendants, the 2010 census shows a striking increase in the Asian American population of Nevada, more so than any other state. Nevada is adjacent to California but has no income tax or the hostile climate for business that California maintains.
The movement of the black population — especially educated young blacks — is the most striking of all.
In the past, the massive movements of millions of blacks out of the South in the early 20th century was one of the epic migrations of a people — comparable in size with the millions of the Irish who fled the famine in Ireland in the 1840s or the millions of Jews who fled persecution in Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In more recent decades, blacks have been moving back to the South, however. While the overall black population of the Northeastern and Midwestern states has not declined in the past 10 years, except in Michigan and Illinois, the net increase of the black population nationwide has increasingly been in the South.
About half of the national growth of the black population took place in the South in the 1970s, two-thirds in the 1990s and three-quarters in the past 10 years.
While the mass migration of blacks out of the South in the early 20th century was to places where there were already established black communities, such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, much of the current movement of blacks is away from existing concentrations of black populations.
Blacks are moving to suburbs, and even to cities like Minneapolis. Overall, the racial residential segregation patterns are declining in the great majority of the largest major metropolitan areas.
Among blacks who moved, the proportions who were in their prime — from 20 to 40 years of age — were greater than in the black population at large, and college degrees were more common among them than in the black population at large.
In short, with blacks, as with other racial or ethnic groups, those with better prospects are leaving the states that are repelling their most productive citizens in general with liberal policies.
Detroit is perhaps the most striking example of a once-thriving city ruined by years of liberal social policies.
Before the ghetto riot of 1967, Detroit’s black population had the highest rate of homeownership of any black urban population in the country, and their unemployment rate was just 3.4%. It was not despair that fueled the riot. It was the riot that marked the beginning of the decline of Detroit to its current state of despair.
Detroit’s population today is only half of what it once was, and its most productive people have been the ones who fled.
Treating businesses and affluent people as prey, rather than assets, often pays off politically in the short run — and elections are held in the short run. Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy.
As whites were the first to start leaving Detroit, then-mayor Coleman Young saw this only as an exodus of people who were likely to vote against him, enhancing his re-election prospects. But what was good for Mayor Young was disastrous for Detroit.
There is a lesson here somewhere, but it is very doubtful if either the intelligentsia or the politicians will learn it.

Who’s John Galt?

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The democrats in Congress think we’re fools, idiots, that we’re powerless, the ignorant who can be ignored. They will learn differently but the process may be long.

From BigGovernment.com…

Lessons from John Galt

Posted By Dan Freeman On December 24, 2009 @ 7:06 am

Atlas-demonstration-H1012-1024x754

Recent headlines seem lifted directly out of an Ayn Rand novel. President Obama decries the “fat cat bankers on Wall Street” [1]. Harry Reid attacks insurance companies for making too much profit. House Democrat leaders call Tea Partiers “Racist, Nazi, Gun Nuts [2]”. How about this nauseating statement made by Army General George Casey [3] after the Muslim terrorist attack on Ft. Hood?

As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well

Each of these headlines might well have been uttered by an Ayn Rand character. Rand, whose father’s pharmacy was confiscated by the Soviets during the communist revolution of 1917, and who came to America in 1926, seems uniquely able to speak to us about the inverted morality of our times. Virtue is to be apologized for. Depravity commands respect. Success is cast as evil and punished while failure is blamed on others and rewarded. Rand’s insights into the psychological state of collectivists—those who demand that we sacrifice our individual freedom and happiness for the sake of the state—explain what often seems incomprehensible to thinking people.

An epic demonstration of the inverted morality that Rand described was on display in Copenhagen last week as the world’s worst most evil dictators—Mugabe and Chavez—partnered with the world’s most visible and misguided progressives—Al Gore , Gordon Brown, Barack Obama—in an orgy of depravity. Sadly, even the Pope lent his moral support [4] to the lunacy, saying, “Industrialized nations must recognize their responsibility for the environmental crisis, shed their consumerism and embrace more sober lifestyles.”

John Galt, the industrialist hero of Rand’s 1957 masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, refers to those in power who stripped men of their minds, wealth and freedom, as mystics. The mystics of spiritmystics of muscle—the progressives who force us to submit to their version of the common good—that Galt despises.

And Barack Obama is a mystic of muscle in its purest form, able to corral the worshipping media, the always superficial Hollywood elites, America hating academics, state-sponsored capitalists (e.g., Goldman Sachs), and grant hungry “scientists” & environmentalists hoping to cash in on a trillion dollar loot of the American people called global warming. These are the pillars of deceit Obama used to get elected. This was how he convinced enough of us to give up our minds for the the mystical concept that Rand called the collective. True to form, Barack, master of the mystics of muscle, has used his power mightily to loot from the producers, and hand it to the parasites, crooks and undeserving (read; SEIU, ACORN, UN Climate Fund [5], General Motors).

John Galt leads a revolt by the productive class and outlines Rand’s philosophy in his 60-page radio address. Here, he explains how human beings—alone among life forms—can choose to be mindless:

A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and destroy the mind.

Sad to say, for a movement powered by the mindlessness, there is plenty of fuel to sustain “hope and change”:

  • Who but the mindless can believe that government run health care will reduce costs and improve care while covering more people?
  • Who but the mindless can believe that this President is now serious about reducing the deficit after shattering spending records [6] during his first year?
  • Who but the mindless can take seriously the sham “jobs summit” held by a President whose every policy is a lesson in job destruction?
  • Who but the mindless can believe Obama’s lie that “Cash for Clunkers” which cost taxpayers $24,000 per car [7] was successful?
  • Who but the mindless would not outraged that our government has reneged on its promise pay back the unused TARP fund to taxpayers [8]?
  • Who but the mindless would not question the morality that the world’s finest health care, which has extended and improved human life in unimaginable ways—conceived and produced by countless unsung heroes in the private sector—should magically be transformed by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi into a “human right”, taken over by the state and rationed out as they please?

The assault on reason by our President and Congress goes on ad infinitum. It is mindlessness that elected “hope and change” and mindlessness that sustains it. Ayn Rand recognized that the greatest struggle on earth is that between the individual and the collective, and to submit to the collective, the individual must lose his ability to think for himself. Howard Roark, hero of The Fountainhead explains [9];

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain.

The last thing a mystic of muscle wants is for us to start using our minds to uncover their fraud. Galt gets to the heart of the evil of progressive demand that we all serve the state when he says,

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

Who’s John Galt?

Posted on by

The democrats in Congress think we’re fools, idiots, that we’re powerless, the ignorant who can be ignored. They will learn differently but the process may be long.

From BigGovernment.com…

Lessons from John Galt

Posted By Dan Freeman On December 24, 2009 @ 7:06 am

Atlas-demonstration-H1012-1024x754

Recent headlines seem lifted directly out of an Ayn Rand novel. President Obama decries the “fat cat bankers on Wall Street” [1]. Harry Reid attacks insurance companies for making too much profit. House Democrat leaders call Tea Partiers “Racist, Nazi, Gun Nuts [2]”. How about this nauseating statement made by Army General George Casey [3] after the Muslim terrorist attack on Ft. Hood?

As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well

Each of these headlines might well have been uttered by an Ayn Rand character. Rand, whose father’s pharmacy was confiscated by the Soviets during the communist revolution of 1917, and who came to America in 1926, seems uniquely able to speak to us about the inverted morality of our times. Virtue is to be apologized for. Depravity commands respect. Success is cast as evil and punished while failure is blamed on others and rewarded. Rand’s insights into the psychological state of collectivists—those who demand that we sacrifice our individual freedom and happiness for the sake of the state—explain what often seems incomprehensible to thinking people.

An epic demonstration of the inverted morality that Rand described was on display in Copenhagen last week as the world’s worst most evil dictators—Mugabe and Chavez—partnered with the world’s most visible and misguided progressives—Al Gore , Gordon Brown, Barack Obama—in an orgy of depravity. Sadly, even the Pope lent his moral support [4] to the lunacy, saying, “Industrialized nations must recognize their responsibility for the environmental crisis, shed their consumerism and embrace more sober lifestyles.”

John Galt, the industrialist hero of Rand’s 1957 masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, refers to those in power who stripped men of their minds, wealth and freedom, as mystics. The mystics of spiritmystics of muscle—the progressives who force us to submit to their version of the common good—that Galt despises.

And Barack Obama is a mystic of muscle in its purest form, able to corral the worshipping media, the always superficial Hollywood elites, America hating academics, state-sponsored capitalists (e.g., Goldman Sachs), and grant hungry “scientists” & environmentalists hoping to cash in on a trillion dollar loot of the American people called global warming. These are the pillars of deceit Obama used to get elected. This was how he convinced enough of us to give up our minds for the the mystical concept that Rand called the collective. True to form, Barack, master of the mystics of muscle, has used his power mightily to loot from the producers, and hand it to the parasites, crooks and undeserving (read; SEIU, ACORN, UN Climate Fund [5], General Motors).

John Galt leads a revolt by the productive class and outlines Rand’s philosophy in his 60-page radio address. Here, he explains how human beings—alone among life forms—can choose to be mindless:

A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and destroy the mind.

Sad to say, for a movement powered by the mindlessness, there is plenty of fuel to sustain “hope and change”:

  • Who but the mindless can believe that government run health care will reduce costs and improve care while covering more people?
  • Who but the mindless can believe that this President is now serious about reducing the deficit after shattering spending records [6] during his first year?
  • Who but the mindless can take seriously the sham “jobs summit” held by a President whose every policy is a lesson in job destruction?
  • Who but the mindless can believe Obama’s lie that “Cash for Clunkers” which cost taxpayers $24,000 per car [7] was successful?
  • Who but the mindless would not outraged that our government has reneged on its promise pay back the unused TARP fund to taxpayers [8]?
  • Who but the mindless would not question the morality that the world’s finest health care, which has extended and improved human life in unimaginable ways—conceived and produced by countless unsung heroes in the private sector—should magically be transformed by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi into a “human right”, taken over by the state and rationed out as they please?

The assault on reason by our President and Congress goes on ad infinitum. It is mindlessness that elected “hope and change” and mindlessness that sustains it. Ayn Rand recognized that the greatest struggle on earth is that between the individual and the collective, and to submit to the collective, the individual must lose his ability to think for himself. Howard Roark, hero of The Fountainhead explains [9];

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain.

The last thing a mystic of muscle wants is for us to start using our minds to uncover their fraud. Galt gets to the heart of the evil of progressive demand that we all serve the state when he says,

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

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Governed by Callous Children

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A h/t to an internet mail-list member, Sehlat. He writes…

When I was growing up, my mother told me of a psychological experiment done with puppies. The puppies were protected from ALL harm or pain. And the researchers discovered that, when they grew up, the puppies would get into grievously painful/harmful situations and do nothing about them, (mention was made of a nose crisping in a fire) because they either couldn’t experience pain, or couldn’t believe it was happening. The dogs ended up destroying themselves and the researchers stopped the research because they couldn’t bear to see this happening.


The parallels to this in Noonan’s essay are terrifying

I am not a Peggy Noonan fan. I believe she has too many ties to the RINOs leading the Republican Party. With that said, I do think she’s uncovered something that should make us all shudder about the future of our country. I’m not sure what can be done at this point. We don’t get “do-overs” in life.

Here’s Noonan’s column from the Wall Street Journal.

We’re Governed by Callous Children

Americans feel increasingly disheartened, and our leaders don’t even notice.

  • By PEGGY NOONAN Columnist's name

The new economic statistics put growth at a healthy 3.5% for the third quarter. We should be dancing in the streets. No one is, because no one has any faith in these numbers. Waves of money are sloshing through the system, creating a false rising tide that lifts all boats for the moment. The tide will recede. The boats aren’t rising, they’re bobbing, and will settle. No one believes the bad time is over. No one thinks we’re entering a new age of abundance. No one thinks it will ever be the same as before 2008. Economists, statisticians, forecasters and market specialists will argue about what the new numbers mean, but no one believes them, either. Among the things swept away in 2008 was public confidence in the experts. The experts missed the crash. They’ll miss the meaning of this moment, too.

The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.

It is a story in two parts. The first: “They do not think they can make it better.”

I talked this week with a guy from Big Pharma, which we used to call “the drug companies” until we decided that didn’t sound menacing enough. He is middle-aged, works in a significant position, and our conversation turned to the last great recession, in the late mid- to late 1970s and early ’80s. We talked about how, in terms of numbers, that recession was in some ways worse than the one we’re experiencing now. Interest rates were over 20%, and inflation and unemployment hit double digits. America was in what might be called a functional depression, yet there was still a prevalent feeling of hope. Here’s why. Everyone thought they could figure a way through. We knew we could find a path through the mess. In 1982 there were people saying, “If only we get rid of this guy Reagan, we can make it better!” Others said, “If we follow Reagan, he’ll squeeze out inflation and lower taxes and we’ll be America again, we’ll be acting like Americans again.” Everyone had a path through.

noonan

Martin Kozlowski

Now they don’t. The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can’t figure a way out. Have you heard, “If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better”? Or, “If only we follow the Republicans, they’ll make it all work again”? I bet you haven’t, or not much.

This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Part of the reason is that the problems—debt, spending, war—seem too big. But a larger part is that our government, from the White House through Congress and so many state and local governments, seems to be demonstrating every day that they cannot make things better. They are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths—spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone—well, not those in government, but most everyone else—seems to know that won’t work. It’s not a way out. It’s not a path through.

And so the disheartenedness of the leadership class, of those in business, of those who have something. This week the New York Post carried a report that 1.5 million people had left high-tax New York state between 2000 and 2008, more than a million of them from even higher-tax New York City. They took their tax dollars with them—in 2006 alone more than $4 billion.

You know what New York, both state and city, will do to make up for the lost money. They’ll raise taxes.

I talked with an executive this week with what we still call “the insurance companies” and will no doubt soon be calling Big Insura. (Take it away, Democratic National Committee.) He was thoughtful, reflective about the big picture. He talked about all the new proposed regulations on the industry. Rep. Barney Frank had just said on some cable show that the Democrats of the White House and Congress “are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area.” The executive said of Washington: “They don’t understand that people can just stop, get out. I have friends and colleagues who’ve said to me ‘I’m done.'” He spoke of his own increasing tax burden and said, “They don’t understand that if they start to tax me so that I’m paying 60%, 55%, I’ll stop.”

He felt government doesn’t understand that business in America is run by people, by human beings. Mr. Frank must believe America is populated by high-achieving robots who will obey whatever command he and his friends issue. But of course they’re human, and they can become disheartened. They can pack it in, go elsewhere, quit what used to be called the rat race and might as well be called that again since the government seems to think they’re all rats. (That would be you, Chamber of Commerce.)

Go here to read the rest of the column. The second part is about half way down. It’s not any more hopeful than the first part.

Governed by Callous Children

Posted on by

A h/t to an internet mail-list member, Sehlat. He writes…

When I was growing up, my mother told me of a psychological experiment done with puppies. The puppies were protected from ALL harm or pain. And the researchers discovered that, when they grew up, the puppies would get into grievously painful/harmful situations and do nothing about them, (mention was made of a nose crisping in a fire) because they either couldn’t experience pain, or couldn’t believe it was happening. The dogs ended up destroying themselves and the researchers stopped the research because they couldn’t bear to see this happening.


The parallels to this in Noonan’s essay are terrifying

I am not a Peggy Noonan fan. I believe she has too many ties to the RINOs leading the Republican Party. With that said, I do think she’s uncovered something that should make us all shudder about the future of our country. I’m not sure what can be done at this point. We don’t get “do-overs” in life.

Here’s Noonan’s column from the Wall Street Journal.

We’re Governed by Callous Children

Americans feel increasingly disheartened, and our leaders don’t even notice.

  • By PEGGY NOONAN Columnist's name

The new economic statistics put growth at a healthy 3.5% for the third quarter. We should be dancing in the streets. No one is, because no one has any faith in these numbers. Waves of money are sloshing through the system, creating a false rising tide that lifts all boats for the moment. The tide will recede. The boats aren’t rising, they’re bobbing, and will settle. No one believes the bad time is over. No one thinks we’re entering a new age of abundance. No one thinks it will ever be the same as before 2008. Economists, statisticians, forecasters and market specialists will argue about what the new numbers mean, but no one believes them, either. Among the things swept away in 2008 was public confidence in the experts. The experts missed the crash. They’ll miss the meaning of this moment, too.

The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.

It is a story in two parts. The first: “They do not think they can make it better.”

I talked this week with a guy from Big Pharma, which we used to call “the drug companies” until we decided that didn’t sound menacing enough. He is middle-aged, works in a significant position, and our conversation turned to the last great recession, in the late mid- to late 1970s and early ’80s. We talked about how, in terms of numbers, that recession was in some ways worse than the one we’re experiencing now. Interest rates were over 20%, and inflation and unemployment hit double digits. America was in what might be called a functional depression, yet there was still a prevalent feeling of hope. Here’s why. Everyone thought they could figure a way through. We knew we could find a path through the mess. In 1982 there were people saying, “If only we get rid of this guy Reagan, we can make it better!” Others said, “If we follow Reagan, he’ll squeeze out inflation and lower taxes and we’ll be America again, we’ll be acting like Americans again.” Everyone had a path through.

noonan

Martin Kozlowski

Now they don’t. The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can’t figure a way out. Have you heard, “If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better”? Or, “If only we follow the Republicans, they’ll make it all work again”? I bet you haven’t, or not much.

This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Part of the reason is that the problems—debt, spending, war—seem too big. But a larger part is that our government, from the White House through Congress and so many state and local governments, seems to be demonstrating every day that they cannot make things better. They are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths—spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone—well, not those in government, but most everyone else—seems to know that won’t work. It’s not a way out. It’s not a path through.

And so the disheartenedness of the leadership class, of those in business, of those who have something. This week the New York Post carried a report that 1.5 million people had left high-tax New York state between 2000 and 2008, more than a million of them from even higher-tax New York City. They took their tax dollars with them—in 2006 alone more than $4 billion.

You know what New York, both state and city, will do to make up for the lost money. They’ll raise taxes.

I talked with an executive this week with what we still call “the insurance companies” and will no doubt soon be calling Big Insura. (Take it away, Democratic National Committee.) He was thoughtful, reflective about the big picture. He talked about all the new proposed regulations on the industry. Rep. Barney Frank had just said on some cable show that the Democrats of the White House and Congress “are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area.” The executive said of Washington: “They don’t understand that people can just stop, get out. I have friends and colleagues who’ve said to me ‘I’m done.'” He spoke of his own increasing tax burden and said, “They don’t understand that if they start to tax me so that I’m paying 60%, 55%, I’ll stop.”

He felt government doesn’t understand that business in America is run by people, by human beings. Mr. Frank must believe America is populated by high-achieving robots who will obey whatever command he and his friends issue. But of course they’re human, and they can become disheartened. They can pack it in, go elsewhere, quit what used to be called the rat race and might as well be called that again since the government seems to think they’re all rats. (That would be you, Chamber of Commerce.)

Go here to read the rest of the column. The second part is about half way down. It’s not any more hopeful than the first part.

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