I doubt that Ayn Rand ever meant for people to actually try withdrawing their effort as a *political* move to force a change. Her book simply shows, in an imaginative metaphorical form, what actually does happen when government interferes with the economy and makes working hard and smart to improve one’s lot into a burden rather than a rewarding proposition.

Don’t worry, the people who are under-rewarded because of taxes and regulations WILL backpedal on the taxable income, because the burden is demotivating, and to do otherwise is to feel like a slave and a bloody fool.

I understand the impulse to want to speed up the disasterous course we’re on, get it over with, and get back on a constructive track. But what I hope for is that we can convince our fellow man – and this will be plenty of work but we’ve got to do it – that Obama is on the wrong track and that we have to change course BEFORE Obama winds up impoverishing the USA and inviting all the vultures and hyenas to pick our bones – such as our Islamist enemies.

Because if the USA is actually destroyed by our present course, we don’t know for sure where it will go from there. It could take far longer than we imagine for a recovery if we allow it to hit full bottom. None of us can read the future, but most of us and our kids will have to live in it.

My solution is to do what you must do (barring the initiation of force or fraud) to prosper as much as possible and keep your spirit alive. If that means keeping your income below the huge taxation level, do that. But if you find that making more money is still worth it regardless of taxes and regulations, fine. Just remember not to make yourself more of a victim than the govenment will. If you reach the point where making one more penny isn’t worth it, stop there. Let nature take its course.

But more importantly, keep refining your understanding of economics and the principles of liberty. Keep improving your ability to *communicate* what you know in a non-insulting, reasonable, informative way. Avoid making crackpot-sounding, out-of-context (to the reader) statements to blow off steam.

And make this effort all over the Internet, wherever you find someone bashing the free market or Objectivism, or cheering on the Obama regime. Keep it calm and don’t be baited by pettiness.

The purpose of what I’m suggesting is not to change the minds, necessarily, of those *posters* who attack free markets or who believe that it was lack of regulation that caused our present crisis. Write to address those readers who haven’t encountered the alternative view, thoughtfully expressed. Write to straighten out the *readers* who are getting their impressions of capitalism, Objectivism, and the causes of the crisis from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

As to the Tea Parties, their usefulness is that they show the public and the politicians that Obama’s camp is not unopposed. There is a significant number of people who think he’s wrong, and a significant number who know that it wasn’t the free market who brought us low.

We’ve got to make the most of this crisis by creating our most intelligent educational campaign and bringing it to the public in as many clever, interesting, attention-arresting ways as we can. The TEa parties are just one way to do it.

Next Tea Party is TAX TIME, April 15th:

http://www.taxdayteaparty.com/

Get off the couch! Let’s roll!

“The economic meltdown is his equivalent to Hitler’s fire in the Reichstag, which he used to get control of a frightened Germany.”

No no! I guess I was unclear. I am not at all supposing that government supplies or even particularly helps in providing goods and services. I was responding to the idea of the “John Galt strategy”. Perhaps either you or I are misunderstanding what Miss Clothier and earlier posters meant by this, but I understood them to mean that, as in Ayn Rand’s book, the productive, enterprising people should refuse to work under socialistic policies that don’t allow them to profit from their efforts, and so drive the economy to collapse, and thus bring down the government. I am not suggesting that the economy would fail BECAUSE of the fall of the government, but rather that an essential component of the Galt plan is that those who initiate it deliberately cause the economy to fail, and the the failure of the economy causes the fall of the government.

I refer to this as a murder/suicide plot because the idea is to force the government to change its policies by deliberately destroying the economy. That is, you voluntarily destroy your own economic well-being in order to destroy the government. That’s a very extreme strategy. In extreme enough circumstances it might be called for, just like killing someone might be called for in extreme circumstances, like self-defense. But depressed as I am about our current government policies, I think there are plenty of things we could so short of deliberately plunging the entire population of the country into poverty.

Its not a murder suicide. Your premise is that government provides electricity, food and all of the rest of your basic needs. This is a false assumption. These are provided by people in trade. Its the government that regulates this trade and can cause its collapse.

Thats why the government that governs best governs least. Thoreau said a 160 years ago.

Jefferson maybe before and Thomas Paine also.

We need a new tax system. The new system will work like this: Every time Congress increases taxes 1%, the tax for members of Congress goes up by 2%. The same thing for tax reductions.

Incentives are the heart of economics.

I suppose there is some point where deliberately destroying the country in hopes of rebuilding on the ashes is the best that can be done. Pessimistic as I am, I think we’re a long way from there. The liberals won the last election by a few percentage points. Surely a more realistic strategy is to try to win back those few percentage points through public debate and persuasion. It would help a lot if the United States had a political party that actually believed in conservative principles.