Why the Going Galt "Movement" is Such A Fraud (Obama, companies)

[idahogie]

So Malkin and Mrs. Ole Perfesser are pumping the "Going Galt" meme for all it's worth. Notice that nobody is actually doing it. Why is that?

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings (http://www.facebook.com/note_redirect.php?note_id=58510869505&h=3639e4932d 4ecead2f8307d554c7eb46&url=http%3A%2F%2Fobsidianwi ngs.blogs.com%2Fobsidian_wings%2F2009%2F03%2Fgoing-john-galt-the-video.html - broken link) had a couple of ideas:

...the three most obvious answers are: (1) they do not believe that anything they do is in fact creative or productive, or (2) they are urging other people to do something they don't have the guts to do themselves, like scam artists who convince people to invest their money in schemes they themselves steer clear of, or (3) they have not bothered to think about what they are saying, even to the limited extent required to see that there's a conflict between their words and their actions.

A commenter there suggested a fourth reason why the wingnuts are frauds on this issue: They know that Rand's philosophy is bull.

So how about it, righties? Why won't you really Go Galt? Why won't you actually disappear, and take all your valuable talents with you? We're bound to fail without your Atlas-ian efforts to keep our society functioning. Wouldn't you like to actually do it, rather than just holding tea parties and posting feeble threats on websites?

[idahogie]

More insanity. Here's Carol Baum of Bloomberg:

The hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is smiling because he’s seen it all before: the government’s intervention in the private sector; the constraints placed on business in the name of the people; the desperation on the part of government bureaucrats when they realize their leverage is limited; and – this part is still fiction – the decision on the part of business leaders to walk away from the enterprises they built. […]

The government needs [AIG’s] Liddy and Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit and Bank of America’s Ken Lewis to continue working to restore their firms to prosperity in the same way the looters in Rand’s novel need Hank Reardon and Francisco d’Anconia and Dagny Taggart, respectively, to run their steel mills, copper mines and railroad.

And Matt Yglesias nails her:

Rand’s novel isn’t about a world in which executives who build companies based on a lot of incorrect decisions, then pay themselves millions of dollars while bankrupting their firms, then come to the government hat-in-hand asking for bailouts, then find that the bailers-out want to attach some strings to their hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds and then go to hide out in Galt’s Gulch.

This is what pisses me off so much about the "Going Galt" movement (if you can call this pathetic whining and tea-party-throwing a "movement"). They are not useful, productive members of society withdrawing their talents. They are more or less average people with a psychological disorder that makes them think they are Galtians. And they will continue whining as the Obama Administration struggles to fix the problems that the conservative movement created. And they will never, ever carry out their "threat."

Even the one's here on CD who make the threat, or those who cheer them on, are just WATB who have zero courage or integrity to carry out their "threat," even though we'd appreciate it if they did.

[Sorry for commenting my own post - I felt the Yglesias comment was pertinent.]

[Shizzles]

I think the fact you're having toddler-style meltdown over it says there is far more credance to it than you think. If we're all so "useless", why the fuss?

[idahogie]

Originally Posted by Shizzles

I think the fact you're having toddler-style meltdown over it says there is far more credance to it than you think. If we're all so "useless", why the fuss?

Point out what is "toddler-style" about it.