“Who is John Galt?”

If Obama wins re-election in November, is it time to “go Galt”?

Writing at the Daily Beast, reliable Obama sycophant, Michael Tomasky, sees a possible Obama landslide in the making:

It’s beginning to look like Obama can lose the big Eastern four—Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida: all of ’em!—and still be reelected.

Personally, I don’t see it – but at this point anything is possible. What I do see is that people are scared, fear the future, becoming despondent and there are more people dependent on the government dole than ever before. The majority of the federal budget goes to entitlements (most actually goes to the middle class – but they also pay the most into programs- like Social Security, so they should expect to get it back), we have a government that refuses to address the unacceptable levels of spending and waste – calling only for more and more taxes, we have a personal income tax system structured so that the vast majority of federal income tax revenue comes from a tiny minority of taxpayers and we have the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.

What is clear is that if Obama does win, we will see unconstrained “progressivism” without consequence – since he will have no worries about reelection. Collectivism will be at its most gruesome zenith since the days of FDR, the major difference is that this time there is no global conflict to unify America against fascist adventurism…well, actually there is – but the “progressives” have aligned themselves with those enemies of the Republic – the radical Islamists and other anti-American and anti-capitalist organizations (think Cass Sunstein, Van Jones, Jeremiah Wright, OWS, etc.). As Jonah Goldberg pointed out several years ago, the liberal/”progressives” have tasted some fascism of their own and decided that they liked it. Rather than defeat it, they have praised its practitioners (like China) and simply repackaged and rebranded it.

Should Obama return to the Oval office in January, it will serve to cement that we have become the very nation of looters that Ayn Rand predicted in Atlas Shrugged. Instead of creating aspirations to be independent and yes, even rich, we are demonizing people who have combined hard work, good fortune, business and social connections and with some, inherited wealth, to create productivity.

If you believe that there are no opposing political parties, as our own Black3 has pointed out, then what is our remaining weapon? If you believe in the conspiracy theories of Carroll Quigley, then why be fooled into voting for your own doom? As Dan “Fake But Accurate” Rather once famously said, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”

I do disagree with Black on Quigley – but only in the organizational aspect of the conspiracy, not the end effect – I simply can’t conceptualize that a bunch of politicians in Washington who couldn’t organize a neighborhood yard sale, could create such a conspiracy on purpose. I don’t believe that it is a conscious and premeditated alliance; it is just that the parties share a common methodology to achieve their ends and both are simply acting in their own self-interest. The outcome is that while the parties horse trade to achieve their goals, the goals of the people they represent are forgotten – but correlation is not causation.

I’m pretty sure that the answer lies in the pages of Atlas Shrugged.

The only thing left to us is to refuse to continue to supply fresh blood to a horde of undead vampires bent on the total exsanguination of America (insert picture of pederast Harry Reid and the undead and botoxed San Fran Nan here). Galt’s pledge gains more resonance with every passing day:

“I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

I think that Galt understood when John Locke wrote this in 1680:

God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.

It is our right as a people to withdraw support from people, entities and governments that take advantage of us. We have a right to the productivity of our own persons as further described by Locke:

Whether we consider natural reason, which tells us, that men, being once born, have a right to their preservation, and consequently to meat and drink, and such other things as nature affords for their subsistence…

God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience. The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being..

Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

It is currently against the law to evade taxes and I am not encouraging anyone to break the law – but that does not stop us from working with each other to avoid taxes and to make it harder for the government to collect them. I think that my dream of eliminating the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 is just that, a dream, but we can look to do more in cash transactions and bartered exchanges that are far more difficult to track. We can reduce the amount of income that is taxed.

It is possible that there can be a broad based tax revolt. The Tea Party Movement may well be the vehicle. Our country was built on one that happened in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773 and this attitude carried forward in the Declaration of Independence:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Who is John Galt?

We are.

It appears that the only tool left is to take up residence in Galt’s Gulch and start the Second Revolution of these United States of America.