Gone Galt
Posted by William Rabkin on March 13, 2009
The rumors you’ve heard are all true: I did, indeed, Go Galt. By which I mean (for those of you who don’t study at the feet of Michelle Malkin) that I took inspiration from the Second Worst Prose Stylyist in the English Language and withdrew my services from society in protest of a threat to return marginal tax rates on top earners to what they were a decade ago. You see, if all the creative, productive people were to simply walk away like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, the theory goes, then the rest of you crumbs would fall into anarchy and chaos while We Chosen Ones would live in Smart People Paradise forever. Or something like that.
For two months I refused the world my creative genius on this blog. And what happened? The Dow plummeted. Unemployment skyrocketed. Paul Blart, Mall Cop became a massive hit.
Finally I realized that what I’d been doing was too selfish and too destructive to continue. I will no longer withhold my genius from the USA, and instead do my part to make us all better off. And I hope you notice that as soon as I began even thinking about coming back, the stock market jumped up. We Galt people are pretty powerful.
Oh, who am I kidding? Actually, I flipped to the end of Atlas Shrugged at Borders the other day and discovered that to really be John Galt I’d have to deliver a sixty page speech explaining the intricacies of my philosophy. (And that’s sixty pages of the smallest type visible without an electron microscope — if my Psych books were printed like this, they could fit on the back of a Cap’n Crunch box.) Since I have trouble stretching out my philosophy to fill a bumper sticker, I figured it was time to give up Galting…
Jerry Hawkins said
You think 60 pages is too long? Ever read Aristotle?
People look at Atlas Shrugged the wrong way. Is it a difficult book to get through? Yes. However, it’s not so much telling a story as it is explaining a philosophy.
Question is, “Do you agree with the idea of the book?”
William Rabkin said
For a hour-long television script, 60 pages is just fine. For one speech, it is ludicrous.
As for the book, well, it presents itself as a novel, and as a novel it’s a disaster — pompous, flatuent, dull, and ludicrous.
But there are plenty of bad novels in the world. Some are even worse than this. It’s as a work of philosophy that I find it to be truly atrocious, even evil. A glorification of the worst instincts of the two year-old inside every human, a rejection of every decent human emotion. It’s a primal scream of “mine, mine, mine!” written by a sociopathic narcissist whose view of the world is simply this — whatever I can get, I deserve, and screw everyone else.
So the answer is, no, I don’t agree with the idea of the book. I find libertarianism adolescent at best, and the Rand version is far from it at its best.
Tom said
That’s curious. I took away from the novel that which my Dad had impressed on me from an early (as in paper route) days… Personal financial self reliance and responsibility. Some headed for the playground, some like me folded newspapers in prep to deliver. We didn’t have the word “slacker” back then but sure is appropriate when I look back now. And its pretty easy to look back and see what side of the isle this behavior would lead people to. Nuff said.