Editorials

The Shut Out, Or How the Individual Citizen Can “Go Galt”

I’m not sure who first came up with the term, “Going Galt”,  but it sure says a lot in two words. I heard it from a friend who I won’t name who went Galt right after the election, disgusted with the nit-pickery of our side more than the thievery of the other side.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, it’s from the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged in which America’s biggest industrialists, faced with the same sort of government tyranny we’re seeing rise today, just close up shop and disappear, thereby refusing to allow their money and assets to prop up a type of government that was both immoral and doomed to fail.

As nice as this sounds, a national corporate boycott, Miss Rand’s thesis wouldn’t work today because most big corporations are three-four generations removed from the original genius that built them, and just as with family fortunes, these corporate heirs are generally driven today by personal self-interest, and nothing higher. In a word, they can be bought, and will sell to the highest bidder which is always government once it announces it’s in the market. (We could write a book on the demise of corporate ethics since the 1970s.)

And considering the ease with which modern day geniuses such as Bill Gates, who was two when Miss Rand wrote about John Galt,  have “succame” (Isiash Thomas) to government encroachment of their boardrooms and treasuries (better to join them than to fight them), I think if we are looking for a new generation of philosopher-entrepreneurs to arise to replace the mythical Galt & friends, we’re looking up the wrong tree. That tree may grow in China, I can’t say, but not inside modern American big business.

This is not to say these seeds don’t exist in America, or that saplings abound. In fact they are out there by the tens of thousands, but the system has been re-designed, with government at the helm, to insure they can never grow large enough to provide bountiful fruit, or shade in the summer and protection from the wind during storms, as Nature alone designed them. Instead they are pruned and cut back from infancy, their growth stunted, while only the most submissive and compliant  are allowed to bloom and grow to full height as members of the crony capitalist forest.

Everyone but the Republican Party has known for twenty years that the Democrats had set their eyes on these entrepreneurial purebreds,  especially from 2009 onward. The Left had set their sights on cutting them back to size as soon as the Reagan tax cuts set them loose. These final four years of Obama’s first term (sic) are meant to finally turn this forest back to fallow ground.

Sorry, that’s just how it is. So the small business class in America is now involved in a life and death struggle just to survive,and are not in a position to launch a counter-offensive against the state. They are losing allies daily, especially the GOP who just agreed with the Left that their expansion, 1984-2008, is what has caused so much misery in America in the first place.

The Shut Out

That said, the idea of a national boycott against the federal government is still very doable. Only, instead of being driven by American Big Business or small business, it will have to be driven by the general citizenry.

Here’s how I think individual Wrecking can work.

Just shut the federal government out in your individual lives. Don’t acknowledge they exist. Don’t mention them. Hang up the phone. You’ll get the news anyway, just don’t let the media deliver it to you. And stay away from politics. The coming debt ceiling crisis, like the fiscal cliff, is all politics and theater, presented by the American Media Theater Company. If you shut out the national media, you shut out government, since it’s only through their lens that you see the national government work.

In truth the federal government impacts our daily lives very little, and it’s almost always about money. They are always pulling for pain by taking more of our money, while we’re always pushing for pleasure, trying to keep more of it.

Billy Ed Wheeler said it best this way in 1965:

Your paycheck, the annual tax filing, the federal gasoline tax (18.4cents/gallon, which is 250% greater than Exxon profits from that sale at the pump), or those sneaky little taxes in your phone bill that were put there temporarily during WWII. A dollar here, a fiver there, 50-60 times a year. That’s how they pinch you.

And then there’s those product ingredient and calorie labels on food packaging, or the required sell-by date, thus insuring a third of the food your parents would have kept in the fridge until it started to smell or turn green, will be thrown out before its time, costing you another $400-$500/yr. Or, what about the new light bulbs (I have something to say about GE later on) or the low-flow toilets where it takes three flushes just to get rid of a bowl of Cheerios with bad strawberries?

In every week of our lives the federal government is just a petty annoyance, an itch. So why then do we aggravte it into a nasty infected rash? For a class of people we wouldn’t let inside our front door, why are we obsessed with their day to day behavior as if it were a daily episode of “Days of Our Lives”?

We have become almost as bad as the Left, who can’t sleep at night thinking someone may be  having an impure, racist, sexist, or homophobic thought. As I used to tell my African-American students in Cincinnati who complained about rednecks across the river who drive around with a Confederate flag in their rear window, “The people who will do you harm know you by name.”

We have become almost as obsessed with politics as has the Left, in the process fighting them with a fire that is natural to them but not to a free people. That fire is Big Government. Our natural weapon, as it always has been, is the Shut Out. Just like 1850. Act as if they don’t exist. Ignore them and you isolate them.

And then they will overreach. By ignoring them you get out in front of them, for they have every intention of becoming an even bigger carbuncle on your existence now that Obama has won. Don’t wait for them to come to your door. Force them to. For what ypu will see is your neighbors, just like you, standing athwart the front gate, same as you. And you will see, figuratively, your city and county officials standing at the ready as well…in your defense. And behind them will be the governor.

This is what the 10th Amendment was always all about.

Let them pass any law. Then make them try to enforce it. If you are in Texas, Virginia (I think) and 30 or so other states, things will work out. The overreach will have its hand slapped. Then bitten.  If you live in California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, well, I’m sorry. It sucks to be you.

But many conservatives are obsessed with the news and politics of Washington. It’s their hobby. Their addiction. Their nourishment. Going cold turkey will be hard, much like quitting smoking. Some of you will feel the DT’s coming on, cold sweats and hands trembling.

As much as it pains you, it will pain the federal government and the MSM much more once  they realize that 70% (or more) of their audiences are watching Andy Griffith (RIP) reruns, reading Dorothy Sayers mysteries, doing crossword puzzles, or eating jelly beans.

But don’t just quit government. Like an AA member, become a missionary. Wear your new freedom on your sleeve. Tell your neighbor.

Show them your patch. Show them your Galt-stained fingers.

                           

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is no longer a spectator event. I still follow events, and I get all the insights I need from Rush Limbaugh. But when he talks politics, I even turn Rush off, because all he is telling me is how cowards, liars, craven dogs and thieves are trying to divide up the spoils. That they’re doing it in a new and clever way doesn’t interest me.

I already know all I need to know about mad dogs. And their only cure.

In other words, my only interested in the national government is strategic and tactical, the same as Robert E Lee wanting to know about General Hooker’s troop movements the first day of Gettysburg.

Shutting Out American Big Business

If you’re going to go Galt, want to be part of a movement, and want to make an impact, you have to put your money where your mouth is.

As much as I’d love to see a national business boycott of the federal government take root, a la Ayn Rand, it can’t.

Crony capitalism is another definition of fascism, which all western governments prefer over the more draconian strictures of communism. Today we are seeing fascism rising quickly in the third-fourth generation corporate world in America, and as with Germany, only events that ripple from  these changes, and possibly the cult of personality of Obama, will dictate how chaotically the next four years will turn out. In Germany all those companies were destroyed because they chose poorly. Totally. In Western Europe, not yet. In America, it’s still a crap shoot.

Big Business services almost all of our consumer needs; food, clothing, transportation, electronics, etc. So we can’t just cut them out. although I’ve found thrift store racks surprisingly nice for whole ranges of better clothing attire.

We can (and should) select winners and losers. Make a list. I’ll buy Sylvania (German) rather then GE light bulbs. I’ll choose Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, etc instead of General Motors or Chrysler. I’ve never bought CITGO, even in a pinch. Make a list based on which major retailers and producers suck up to Obama, then find an alternative. You already did that with Chick Fil A. Consider that Michelle recently flaunted (leaked) a new inexpensive clothing line from Target (a French company) as a way to direct business away from Walmart. So now I’m a satisfied Walmart customer. Then send a letter, sometimes two.

A simple matter of Letters

Make your own list, but one trick is to actually bother to sit down and send a hand written letter (no emails, after all they share these with you know who) not to the CEO or President, but to the appropriate customer relations office. Look at their home page and get an address. (We had such a person in my company, a little dowager who had a small office down a side hallway at corporate HQ. Though I drove there weekly. I only met her twice. She looked like a librarian from the FDR era, her hair in a bun with a pearl pin. All she did was read every complaint or return letter, reply, then once a year, like a hibernating bear, come out and present her annual report, then go back into her cave.  We were a billion dollar company and sold 30-40 million garments a year, so I marveled at how much sway this little lady had with senior management.)

So your letters will matter. Your emails not so much.

The name of the game from here on out is Wrecking. The best way to do this is by Shutting the feds out, for in fact, their main purpose is to insinuate themselves into your house, but most of all, via the main stream media, under your skin.

For twenty years actually, we’ve proved that strategy works.

Deny them that and I promise, they will overreach. They will step in a cowpile trying to get to tour front door.

And if they decide to try and come for our guns without Congress and SCOTUS endorsement, all other bets are off.

 

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