I hope he can take a night out now and then to enjoy a beer courtside at a b-ball game. pffft the cocktail parties. which you think he prefers?
Pandagon: Obliquely Mentioned On Instapundit
pandagon.net
A word to the unwise: when someone criticizes your whining that you’ll forsake thousands of dollars in income to avoid dozens of dollars in taxes, it’s not an answer to say that someone else didn’t pay their taxes, so nyah.
The point of the “going Galt” criticism is that people are threatening to act (not even acting, as they’re all still deriving income from blogging and writing and government institutionsahemGlennReynolds, despite the fact that it’s perfectly within their means to stop all of these activities posthaste) like petulant, irrational babies in order to accomplish a goal we all know good and damn well none of them will make even a token effort to accomplish. It’s high art irrationality, on par with threatening to hold your breath until you die unless you go to ice cream NOW.
Simply put, it seems rather uncontroversial to say that people, inasmuch as they have the ability to do so, will pursue paths that make them happy. And it makes little sense that a bunch of alleged free market capitalists will bow out of the making money game in order to avoid a slightly larger tax burden for the diffuse benefit of making a statement of roughly no impact while drastically increasing their own material unhappiness. How do we know this? Because nobody’s doing this. It’s yet another in the long line of shamnesty-porkulus-pro-war-anti-choice populist revolutions that define modern conservatism while failing to describe any actual populist sentiment.
The problem with thinking that you’re John Galt is that very few, if any, are John Galt (nobody is, actually, which is why Atlas Shrugged is fiction and not the fifth Gospel). Most are not creative geniuses able to remove themselves from the world as a statement of their towering intellectual superiority. Most are people who will find themselves pissily sitting in the desert wondering where the nearest McDonald’s is, rapidly planning how to get back to work while saving face. You want to stop Obama’s deadly plans to destroy the very capitalist Earth itself? Stop playing Objectivist He-Man, stop worshipping a fuckwit radio host and get to work building a political movement that can’t get its ass beaten by an Indonesian-born black radical communist. Or wait, don’t, because you the movement you built with Reagan went and screwed everything up with the first place. You want a copy of The Fountainhead next? |
