Conservative Libertarian Outpost

What is the breaking point? Where will the resistance form? Heavy questions, but unavoidable in the current political climate. The productive members of society can only be pushed so far, some say.

What they envision is not defiance of law or a reversal of the election. It is people’s growing disengagement from a new economic order that punishes effort and rewards envy — the creepy future that Bill Ritter and Barack Obama intend for us. Columnist Michelle Malkin calls that withdrawal “going Galt.”

Malkin was the first speaker last weekend when several hundred Coloradans gathered for a free-market leadership conference in Colorado Springs. Her reference was to John Galt, the individualist hero of Ayn Rand’s novel, “Atlas Shrugged.” She told of seeing a placard at the protest rally for Obama’s stimulus bill signing that warned: “Atlas will shrug.”

So what, you ask. In human behavior, incentives matter. People are choosers, not automatons. Mess them over enough and they’re out of here. All history proves it. “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” That bitter joke among Soviet factory drones sums up collectivism’s ultimate failure wherever tried.

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Tags: Atlas Shruged, Ayn Rand, Economy, News, Politics

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