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1. Art Downs says:

   June 6, 2009 at 8:56 pm

   ‘Going Galt’ (for those unfamiliar with the term) means emulating the fictional John Galt created by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged. He was a brilliant engineer who dropped out of society because he was not rewarded for his brilliance in an era when socialism was creating an arbitrary egalitarianism and ‘wants’ became ‘needs’ and the link with productivity was severed.

   A lot of young people were swayed from faith in statism by reading Rand’s books but her ideas should never be taken as a secular form of holy writ. Her heroes were often too pure to be believable.

   Yet the character Ellsworth Toohey (the critic in The Fountainead) seems to be the prototype for a lot of bureaucrats.

2. callerRick says:

   June 7, 2009 at 11:16 am

   The ‘Galting’ is already occuring; IPO’s are vanishing from U.S. exchanges and moving to Europe, China and the Middle East…even Africa (see Liquid Africa Holdings, Africa Fund I, Africa Investment Horizons, et al).

   As America becomes obsessed with printing worthless currency and dabbling with Socialism, China, Russia, UAE, India and Southeast Asia are building furiously (have you seen the architecture in Pudong and Kuala Lampur?), with the goal of ending U.S. economic hegemony.

   We may end-up being ‘friends’ with the world, and we may well ‘invest’ in social services until we’re totally bankrupt. But, people with real money, who want a real return, will invest elsewhere. Investment in government isn’t investment at all; it is patronage

   With any luck, the automoble may one day be as ubiquitous in Delaware as it was on the streets of 1965 Moscow- but we’ll at least have Cuban-style healthcare.