Galt-ernate Reality

So, the right has taken up the call of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged and its protagonist, the Original Whiny Rich Boy, John Galt (empahsis moi):

“Just this weekend,” said Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) on Wednesday in an interview with TWI, “I had a guy come up to me in my district and tell me that he was losing his interest in the business he’d run for years because the president wanted to punish him for his success. I think people are reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ again because they’re trying to understand what happens to people of accomplishment, and people of talent and energy, when a government turns against them. That’s what appears to be happening right now.”

The plot of Rand’s novel is simple, despite its length — 1,088 pages in the current paperback edition. The United States is governed by bureaucrats, “looters” and “moochers,” who penalize and demonize creative people. The country is in decline because creative people are disappearing — they have followed the innovative John Galt to a mountain enclave, “Galt’s Gulch,” where they watch society crumble. Creativity has gone on strike (the working title of the novel was “The Strike”), and the engine of capitalism cannot run without it.

For Campbell, this is a powerful and relevant story. The congressman calls “Atlas Shrugged” an “instruction manual,” and inscribes the copies that he gives to interns. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, also gives copies of the novel as gifts and refers to it to make the case against President Obama’s policies. “It’s an audacious scheme,” said Ryan in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference last week. “Set off a series of regulatory blunders and congressional meddling, blame the free market for the financial crisis that follows — then use this excuse to impose a more intrusive state. Sounds like something right out of an Ayn Rand novel.”

What all these wonderfully creative and talented elite forget is that frankly, they're the ones who lost trillions in the first place. The "blunders" that these idiots and morons are discussing were not made by the government. They were made by these self-proclaimed masters of the universe who lobbied the government to remove as much oversight and regulation as possible from our financial system. With this oversight gone, these creative geniuses then promptly manufactured financial instruments so maddeningly complex and arcane that at the first hint of financial downturn, entire financial giants collapsed seemingly overnight from being leveraged 35 to 1.

Now that they have been caught, these guys are in fact blaming the rest of us, the "unproductive" members of society, the "moochers" that in this country who only exist because the government takes lifeblood from these heroes and dares to bestow them on the rest of the useless dregs of humanity, i.e you and me.

Well, I've got news for the Galties. You're not a unique and beautiful snowflake, as Tyler Durden once said. We're all in this together, and when given the chance to excel with your ubermensch powers, you instead got greedy and led the country down the primrose path to Hell.

You lost. Obama won. Now you pay the price. And actually, we're all paying the price for you. Your time is over. You had your shot. You blew it to the tune of trillions.

Now it's our turn.