A Quick Commentary on Atlas Shrugged

After reading a post by the Instawife asking if it was time for the productive people of the US to "go John Galt", I picked up an audio copy of the book referenced in that post, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

Wow.

I'm about a quarter of the way through the book and already it's made me see the world in a different way. I now understand the people who said reading it changed their lives. Having said that, I don't completely agree with the idea of going John Galt.

Barack Obama is a parasite. He is encouraging more of us to become parasites, too. For example, Barack has never worked in an oil field. He has never worked in the companies that make deep water drilling rigs, specialized drill bits for deep earth drilling, or the ones that make pipelines. Yet his car is always filled with gasoline and the engine lubricated with oil. The oil companies he wants to loot make far less on their invested money than do the companies of his rich, parasite-encouraging contributors like Apple or Google.

Parasite.
Barack and his friends are perfect examples of the looters described in Ayn Rand's novel. They produce nothing that we use and instead sieze wealth to distribute to yet more people who produce nothing.

There are communities where Atlas Shrugged has been played out perfectly. In Zimbabwe, the looters drove off the white farmers who created the country's wealth and took all of their land and equipment. As individual farms were looted and farmers murdered, farmers who had yet to be attacked went John Galt, packed up and left the country, leaving their farms in the hands of the looters.

In some of our own inner cities, the looter class has similarly driven off productive businesses. In states such as California, a looter government is driving out businesses. Companies would rather go John Galt than stay and have the products of their labor siezed by the government and handed out to parasites.

And yet, going John Galt is an act of defeatism. It's running away from the problem and not confronting it. It's what you do when the parasites become too strong and too numerous to fight. We're not there yet.

If you don't like the Obama concept of spreading the wealth out to the people behind you through soul-rotting forced income redistribution which incubates still more parasites, then do something else with it. If you donate some of your income to organizations like the Concord Coalition, which tries to educate people about our disastrous debt problem, then it is not available to parasites like Obama and is actually used to fight them.

While I love the book, I'm not yet ready to go John Galt. I'm not yet ready to quit. More later.