The headline in Investor’s Business Daily, September 16,
2009: “45% of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes
Health Care Overhaul.”
The headline in the Boston Globe, September 28, 2009:
“States risk it, raise tax on rich.”
The problem with four of nine U.S. doctors saying they
“would consider leaving their practice or taking an early
retirement” is that “the number of doctors is already lagging
population growth,” reports Investor’s Business Daily.
Add millions of new patients to a shrinking supply of doctors and
the obvious result is an English-style queue, longer waits in
pain, and a centrally-directed rationing of service.
The aforementioned Boston Globe article on soaking
the rich explains that New York’s increased confiscation of
income from the “deep-pocketed rich” through higher taxes is
producing a “millionaires’ exit.”
Said New York’s lieutenant governor, Richard Ravitch, regarding
the flight of the state’s millionaires and the decline in
government revenues that has already occurred as a result of the
higher tax rates: “People aren’t wedded to a geographic place as
they once were.”
In Atlas Shrugged, a novel by Ayn Rand, the most
productive and creative citizens in the United States —- the
innovators, risk-takers, artists, entrepreneurs, capitalists,
intellectuals, industrialists —- overturn the conventional
concept of victimhood and go on strike, refusing any longer to be
exploited by society, refusing to be demonized as too successful,
too rich, too individualistic, too free.
Led by John Galt, the novel’s hero, the industrious organize a
strike against the ever-expanding yoke of government coercion.
They strike to halt the murder of man’s spirit, to halt the
confiscation of man’s work, to defend individualism, reason,
liberty, human achievement and the market economy.
They strike by mysteriously disappearing, by withdrawing their
productivity from society, by withdrawing their minds and
ingenuity, in a walkout that Galt describes as “stopping the
motor of the world.”
Near the climax of the novel, Galt takes over a radio broadcast
to reveal the strike and its rationale, explain why society
has collapsed into an ever-growing crisis of scarcity and misery,
and deliver a manifesto for liberty to a corrupt society:
I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has
destroyed your world.… All the men who have vanished, the
men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them
away from you. We are on strike against self-immolation. We are
on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded
duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of
one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine
that life is guilt…
There is a difference between our strike and all those you’ve
practiced for centuries: our strike consists, not of making
demands, but of granting them. We are evil, according to your
morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are
useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to
exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled,
according to your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you,
nor to wear the shackles any longer.
You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed
independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You
have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem
to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty…
Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of
morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I
have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have
removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by
one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have
deprived your world of man’s mind…
While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of
justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem, I
beat you to it —- I reached them first. I told them the nature
of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of
yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp…
The inauguration of Barack Obama took place on January 20, 2009.
The Economist magazine reported that week
that Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, had
moved up to 33rd place among Amazon’s top-selling books.
