“Going Galt,” named after an Ayn Rand so-called “captain of industry” (a.k.a., “wealth producer”), has become a rallying cry for certain free market fundamentalists, libertarians and self-style “populists” who are upset at the massive amount of money the U.S. federal government has doled out to the financial and investment industry. Regardless of ideology, most Americans have been troubled by the sight of billions of dollars given to Henry Paulson’s cronies and the donors of the House Financial Services Committee with little, if any oversight. But the “Galt” movement (if it’s even big enough to call it that) is a reactionary and misguided display of “rebellion,” at best, and class resentment against helping the working poor who got exploited during the mortgage bubble. As Sam Barr recently observed:

It makes little sense to complain about one class being “punished” when there is another class of people, as I suggested yesterday, who are even more “punished” despite their hard work, and who would stand to benefit from the “punishment” of the first group. Basically, the right needs people to believe in the myth of the welfare queen. Perhaps that explains why they got so worked up over a guy in a homeless shelter who took a picture of Michelle Obama with his cell phone.

August Pollack has a great cartoon explaining just how silly and self-defeating the threat to “strike” against the government is. A good sign that it’s ridiculous is that Michelle Malkin loves it. And Frank Rich shows how the “Going Galt” resentment ignores the last 8 years of irresponsible fiscal policy and corporate greed that infected our culture and produced huge disparities of wealth:

This inequity was compounded by Bush tax policy and by lawmakers and regulators of both parties who enabled and protected the banking scam artists who fled with their bonuses and left us holding the toxic remains. The fantasy of easy money at the top of the economic pyramid trickled down to the masses, who piled up debt by leveraging their homes much as their ’20s predecessors once floated stock purchases “on margin.” Our culture, meanwhile, painted halos over celebrity C.E.O.’s, turning the fundamentalist gospel of the market into a national religion that further accelerated the country’s wholesale flight from reality.

Word.

Tags: capitalism, conservatives, economy, going galt, libertarianism, mortgage crisis

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under In Contempt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.