There were many things I wanted to say on the Mike Church show, but there was no time to say them. But I spent an hour or so preparing talking points, and it’d be a pity to let them go to waste. 
What I wanted more than anything to squeeze in there is something that’s got me very indignant right now.
The stimulus package has a $2.5 million earmark for New Orleans to buy 100 Veloway bicycles for the New Orleans area. This is some crazy public bike sharing plan, and the breakdown per bike is $25,000. These wildly expensive bikes are going to be stolen the first day. And that’s one example out of thousands of earmarks, some in the billion dollar range. Don’t tell me $250 thousand dollars is “rich,” but 2.5 million dollars is nothing!
Why go Galt?
Government is WAY too big, blows money on ridiculous things, and a very small group is actually paying the bill for this train wreck. Government won’t contract voluntarily, so the only thing we can do is starve it. TaxFoundation.org has special report called Who Pays America’s Tax Burden, and Who Gets the Most Government Spending? It has a chart that shows how the entire nation is being carried by 40% of taxpayers. The top 40% – people making more than 65 thousand is one group, and people making more than 100 thousand is the other, are paying everybody else’s “fair share.” This is how it’s been for years and very few people complained. The people who actually keep the country afloat have just gone on producing as much as they can. But now that’s not good enough; people complain about the greedy rich people who aren’t paying enough.
The government is demonizing the rich, engaging in class warfare; Joe Biden essentially called wealthy people “unpatriotic” for not stepping up to the plate and paying more, it’s implied or outright said that these rich people are greedy. (Biden is obviously projecting!)
What does it mean to go Galt?
Depends on who you ask, but in general, it means a conscious decision to produce less as a form of protest. When you raise taxes, historically people already do produce less, even though they don’t think of that as “going Galt.” But in this context, it’s purposeful – it’s an attempt to starve the government of funds, and to convey the message to the 60% that government doesn’t have any money it didn’t first take from the people.
One aspect of going Galt means making the government live up to Alinsky’s rule #4 – make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. The theory is that the government is going to take care of all these people. The reality is that the government doesn’t have any money it did not first take from people. There is no “government money.”
So to me, what going Galt is really all about is getting people to understand the actual source of money. I’m looking forward to seeing how the government is going to take care of all of these 60 percenters if enough of the 40 percenters decide they’ve had enough of supporting people who call them greedy, unpatriotic, evil, and selfish.
It’s mostly the people making $250k and up – about 2% of the country’s taxpayers. But even people like me, making a lot less than that, can go Galt. Last year my family paid almost a thousand dollars a month to the IRS. I’m not even talking about state taxes, taxes at the gas pump, grocery store and all that. JUST FEDERAL TAXES.
What about the poor?
The phenomenally successful welfare reforms in the Clinton administration lifted more black children out of poverty than any other government program in history. The short version of those reforms is that we stopped giving people money and pushed them into getting jobs. And the poor aren’t what people think, anyway.
The left says we’re deliberately going to screw up the country – but that accusation is basically an admission that the 40% is paying all the bills; they know it, and they want to keep our nose to their grindstone. If we’re wrong about what going Galt means, then what do they care if we produce less? But if we’re right, their whole system will come crashing down.
It is not sustainable – to use a word much beloved by the left – to have 40% of the taxpayers – and that’s taxpayers, not Americans! Consider how many people don’t work because they’re old, young, sick, or whatever – carrying the weight of the rest of the country.
And to recap the original post: Think of it as praying the alcoholic in your family will hit rock bottom sooner, rather than later. It’s time to stop enabling the entitlement mentality. It’s time to let go of our co-dependency and desire to be liked. It’s time for an intervention. It’s time to go John Galt.
Added: a couple of excellent posts from Will Wilkinson, whose blog I just added to my RSS list. He’s got an interesting take on going Galt.
By the way, Atlas buffs, the point of Atlas Shrugged is not that you are John Galt. The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. You’re smart, hardworking, productive, and true. But you’re no creative genius and you take innovation — John Galt — for granted. You don’t even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks.
Of course, the Atlas analogy isn’t a perfect fit, but the thesis holds pretty well, I think. There was only one John Galt, but there were a whole lot of other people that Francisco d’Anconia enticed to join the strikers, without whose cooperation John Galt could not have succeeded. One guy walking around in a sandwich board is a joke. A nationwide movement is an entirely different matter, and it will necessarily be comprised of people at various income levels and skill sets.
The bottom line is that only 40% of taxpayers are carrying the rest of the country. Nor – unlike the residents of Galt’s Gulch – can we drop out entirely. We can only limit our participation. But if enough of us limit our contributions – and eventually China will tire of being our banker, and the world will see we are no longer a profitable investment – then as we heard all throughout the last election season, we’ll successfully “make change.” The current system is already not sustainable; all we’re trying to do is speed up the process.
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