I love it here at the Moose. Interacting with you guys gives me, well…a thrill up my leg. There, I said it. Because of the high regard I hold you all in, I wanted you to be the first to know:
I’m Going Galt.
What, haven’t you heard? It’s the new thing. Thanks to Obama’s crushing tax policies, America is now punishing awesomeness and success! What the hell are they thinking?? This is Econ 101 people, punish success and people will stop being successful. More specifically, I, and dozens of my brethren will stop being successful, on purpose, to prove how foolish these policies are!
See, this visionary, Ayn Rand, wrote a really prophetic book, where the brilliant, creative awesome overclass just got tired of carrying the “looters and moochers” (technical terms folks, shrug it off). These wunderkinds move away to a sort of uber-creative Shangri-La, and ROFL lustily while the leaderless, idea-strapped society crumbles behind them.
I hear you skeptics talking about how ridiculous a premise it is. To the guy way in the back, no it’s not “fucking stupid”. Check it out: turns out that some completely nonpartisan think tank, the Tax Foundation, figured out a way to tell who the moochers were, and summarized it in this brilliant chart:
Holy Grover Norquist, Batman! In a nutshell, anyone above about 60k is “carrying” anyone below 60k. Don’t go fretting about how public goods like National Defense are allocated. Don’t janitors get as much value from GPS satellites as Garmin Corp? Doesn’t our legal system treat the poor and the rich equally? Damn straight.
Me, I’m rightwards of what I like to call the “Inflection Point of Brutal Enslavement”, and I am pissed. Nor am I alone. Here’s a great take on the situation from a fellow neogaltian:
By going John Galt – reducing my income to the point that I no longer subsidize anyone else via government imposed wealth transfers – I hope to hasten the inevitable collapse. The H.E.N.R.Y.s feel the same way; people who are in the dreaded eeevil, mean capitalist pig $250,000 bracket are cutting back on their productivity. As they should – where does society get the right to enslave these people? The faster the 40% opts out, the sooner the collapse, and the sooner we can correct the situation.
THAT’s what I’m talking about! Fair warning, folks – I’m going to be accepting less pay for the job I do, thereby sticking it to The Man (i.e. you). Just you wait until my employer has to cut my salary by 40%, his conscience is going be to killing him. How long is he going to be able to live with the burden of watching me work for nearly half what he used to pay me??
Yeah, it’s brutal, but that’s how I roll. Since we’re laying on the line, I’ll go even farther: If that sumbitch even looks like he’s going to give me a raise, I might QUIT. Tax THAT, biatch!
My posse is not playing, I swear to god, and we are deadly serious. They nail it at The Corner:
The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant “up or out” policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today – in their peak earning years
So, what happens when the heart surgeons, dentists, litigators, and people who employ 10 or 20 other people in their mid-size businesses decide that they don’t want to pay for the excessive, pointless spending that the president finds so compelling? Instapundit speculates on people “going John Galt.” I think golf – a time-intensive sport that the hard-working have eschewed for the past decade or two because it took too long – will make a comeback
You smell what we’re cookin yet? Not only will we free up vast swathes of potential business niche, supercharging the economy with burgeoning and unmet demand, we will completely hose your tee times. What’s up now, fools?
Look, you can still turn it around. I don’t want to do this to you guys, but extraordinary times, etc etc. If you dare to raise my taxes to Clinton-era rates, with all the economic destruction thereby wrought…well, the consequences are on your head. I’ll be tearing up my next paycheck as an object lesson – consider it a warning.
Oh, and ignore this moron:
The “going Galt” people remind me of the scene in “A Christmas Story” where Ralphie fantasizes about his parents’ tearful contrition when he returns home years later, blinded by soap poisoning.
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