Saturday, March 14, 2009

Who Is John Galt?

As I have written many times, one of the most important pieces of advice I've ever gotten came from a cantankerous Ayn Rand, shaking her finger in my face after my interview in Texas..."You have one thing to do with your life, young man. One thing only...see clearly. That is all. See clearly!"

This from Capitalism Magazine on the left-wing reaction to the re-rise of Randian politics:
The Americans who recently protested the spendthrift policies of the Obama administration and Congress with “tea parties,” and who plan to protest them on an even larger scale in the near future, one can wager are not regular readers of The New York Times. They cannot have much in common with its columnists and editors, nor with the news media.

So the collectivist and altruist elite become very touchy when the people for whom they are “doing good” for their own sake, even to the point of enacting coercive and felonious legislation, exhibit signs of intelligence, resistance and anger. How dare these yokels!

And nothing raises their hackles higher than any mention of Ayn Rand.

The cultural and political elite are upset that she has not been forgotten. That philosophy has returned to haunt them and aggravate their guilt. And they are in high dudgeon because they are being cast in the role, not as saviors, but as her black-hearted villains. They are discovering that ideas cannot be interred as permanently as their authors. Atlas Shrugged is on their minds.

The Times blog, “Opinionator” (a round-up of positions expressed in other blogs) of March 6th, called “’Going Galt’: Everyone’s Doing It!“ is a testimonial to how the elite have been blind-sided in their arrogant complacency and sent spinning out of control on the Internet highway, and evidence of how thoroughly they have been indoctrinated in the belief that reality has nothing to do with their chosen “reality.” They are deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming train, but sneer that the train does not exist. They are stuffed animals crammed with the excelsior of worn-out bromides, mulched second-hand sociology, and the sawdust of a failed ideology.

8 comments:

RKL said...

Unfortunately, we can't stop it for a couple of years. We need to get John Galt to speak and before it's too late.

RKL

Anonymous said...

That last line seems to sum them up very well.
Tom Bogan

Anonymous said...

..."re-rise of Randian politics?" The closest we came to Randian politics in the last century was Ms. Rand's protege Alan Greenspan heading the Fed, and look where that got us. What we're getting now is a re-rise of Randian rhetoric.

Rhetoric may be fun, but that's all it is.

Anonymous said...

We need to allow Greenspan to complete his "conversion" process. I'm sure that now that he has had a achance to ponder his poor performance and mistakes, he has come to realize that he has learned something. That would be that you cannot, under any circumstances, compromise capitalism and expect to have a self-righting economy. Further, if you add any amount of "socialism" to the mix, you deplete the benefits of capitalism by a geometric factor. The more socialism that you add, the faster the benefits of capitalism disappear and conversely, the fatser failure is achieved due to socialism.
I firmly believe that had John Maynard Keynes (the father of "Keynesian Economics") lived long enough (I think that he died in 1946.), he would also agree. He is popularly being quoted by liberals as the capitalist that they agree with, as far as his belief that the government could "spend" us out of the depression. He had witnessed the failure of Hoover's spending to cure the Great Depression. He also witnessed the effects that World War II had on the economy, due to the stimulation of our manufacturing industries. If he was alive to have experienced "Reagan-omics", he would espose that philosophy wholey.
Life Member and "Capitalist Pig"

Anonymous said...

I'm rereading "ATLAS" again after some years and I find the concepts mentioned all around us. The losses we've seen in the financial circles are like the investors of the San Sebastian mines and the polices that ruined "Taggart Transcontinental" are on tap for our industries. God save us and buy a copy and give it to a friend.

Anonymous said...

Human frailty -- that's our nemesis, dammit!

Carteach said...

Well written, and thanks for sharing that.

Anonymous said...

John Gault is the man who stopped the motor of the world in Atlas. Perhaps this presciption applies today? No one notices demonstrations, but our rulers might notice a national strike of a day or a week. Stay home from work, buy nothing.
BTW Dagny IS my real first name!