Glenn Reynolds publishes an email from one of his readers, and I use his quote in full:
READER ZACH WHITE EMAILS: “If Obama is reelected, good hardworking people should give up and go Galt. The tipping point is the 2012 election. Will the makers finally succumb to the takers? It’s pointless to think that if America reelects the most unqualified disastrous president in recent memory, we should stand our ground and continue fighting. it’s a signal that marxist free-lunchism and free birth control for everyone trump economic well-being and prosperity in the minds of the masses. Give up. Go Galt. Protect what few assets you have left, and start to hunker down for the coming storm. America is beyond screwed, well past the fiscal insanity of a number of EU countries. Think of it this way – we sit and watch California destroy itself and wonder who could be so foolish as to remain there and dedicate himself to indentured servitude in a state headed for disaster. Why don’t those fools just leave!! Same for Venezuela. as they descend into chaos and totalitarianism, do they reject Chavez more? The answer is plainly no. The spiral down the drain is irreversible and obvious. The more the government creates misery, the more they create programs to help people cope with the misery they’ve created, and we achieve a perpetual negative feedback loop. My advice is simple – if Obama is reelected, get a lawyer and a financial advisor, cash out as much of your assets as you can, and prepare yourself for a nosedive off a cliff. anything else would be imprudent and irresponsible to yourself and your dependents. Who wants to be a Dagny Taggart dedicating themselves to a life of indentured servitude trying to correct the wrongs of a heavy-handed government? i will not be volunteering. I didn’t give up on America, America gave up on me.”
I don’t know. I don’t know if the fight is worth it any more, either. It’s not in my nature to just throw up my hands and give up, but after the last ten years of my own life-experience – one of a steadily crumbling lifestyle, continued unemployment, and now a body blow that tells me that basically that, to the majority of Americans, I’m just ‘old and in the way’. Another part of me wants to sit back, wait, and enjoy a big ol’ bowl of schadenfreude.
I’m not like the fellow quoted above- I don’t have his options. That makes the immediate future just that more bleak.
I guess I’m feeling this now- all my life I’ve tried to play by the rules, but, though I realize a Capitalistic system makes no promises, I always felt that in the end I could make my own opportunities and make my own way. I could still hope, because after all, we’re that ‘shining city on the hill’, right? Well, last night was a brisk kick in the ‘nads. The system has broken. More takers than makers- and I’m a maker.
It’s just- right now- no one wants what I make. And I’ve got to eat. And I need a roof over my head. And for the first time in my life I see fading hopes that either will happen. No way out.
“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Benjamin Franklin, 1787
I hear bagpipes playing.
