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The Spectacle Blog
The financial collapse of 2008 and ensuing tsunami of bail-outs led to a surge in sales of Ayn Rand’s books. Many of her acolytes asked: Is Atlas about to shrug? Will productive people increasingly flee what is becoming an ever more dysfunctional, distributionist state?
The writer “Monty Pelerin” warns that the time may be approaching:
Atlas is shrugging in the US. Capital is relocated to regions where it is treated more favorably. Within the country, we see capital and jobs leaving the overtaxed, overregulated Blue states and migrating to smaller government Red states. That provides partial relief, but onerous federal policies cannot be avoided by moving within the country.
The increasingly adverse climate at the federal level motivates moving outside the country. This motivation and the resulting movement has been underway for years. Initially, much relocation was due to comparative advantages in regions around the world as economics would predict and welcome. Recently, much movement of resources is increasingly a flight from onerous government policies. The process is simple: first parts of businesses leave (outsourcing), then manufacturing and finally intellectual capital (the entrepreneurs).
Intelligent and talented people investigate overseas opportunities. Jobs and opportunities are increasingly more plentiful in some areas of the world. Taxes are less onerous and living conditions have modernized. Dual citizenship is not uncommon and an attractive option for people who want/need to leave the US. Americans renouncing citizenship and living outside the US is at an all-time high. The citizenship decision is made for an obvious reason — to escape the predatory IRS which claims partial ownership of all income regardless of where earned.
Over the next decade or two, unless we see a change in US governmental policies, a serious “brain drain” is likely to devastate the US talent pool. Our society and economy benefited immensely from the immigration of talent over the last 70 years. It was an attractive place for talented, motivated individuals. That flow is now reversing. Instead of being a destination for talent, we are becoming a departure point. Much of the rest of the world does not punish productive people.
Such a migration might be the only way to constrain the avaricious looters in Washington. They can steal wealth that has been created. But they cannot force people to keep generating wealth to steal in the future.
And there’s no need for a “Galt’s Gulch” hidden away in America if other nations are willing to accept and protect entrepreneurs. U.S. politicians may rail against the ungrateful and unpatriotic rich, but the real enemies of America are those who achieve power by demonizing the successful while producing nothing useful themselves.
Will America change before Atlas shrugs? That may become the most important political question in the coming years.
View all comments (21) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Doug Bandow
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/06/25/will-atlas-shrug
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Ken (Old Texican)| 6.25.11 @ 8:51AM
Doug,
Atlas has merely taken a (hopefully only) four year coffee break.
Except for the companies at the government trough, everyone else has hunkered down. Some folks call it deleveraging but that term is too narrow.
Thank God we got the House back to slow the blood loss, but our future is still going to be a close-run thing.
megapotamus| 6.25.11 @ 4:25PM
Yes, the hunker. I am pretty hunkered myself and not nearly hunkered out but until the coast seems plausibly clear no one in Hunkertown is going to be spending on any whimsy and whimsy is what makes the economic world go 'round, at least where food and shelter are not prohibitively scarce.
Handy| 6.25.11 @ 9:19AM
Atlas shrugged even before the book was published. We are now seeing the end game. Regular people are withdrawing, en masse.
It took "Joe Six Pack" a little longer to catch on, but he has finally caught the hint. The Atlases are long gone, and Joe is about ready to start brewing his own beer.
A new Dark Age is a dawning.
Mimi| 6.25.11 @ 9:51AM
Yes, a 4 year trip down a side road. We got a good glimpse...and definately DON'T like what we see....Yep , a journey away from the AMERICAN WAY. We are about the " FIX" now, but the way back will be tough! As Mark Levin said this past week, he's waiting for the person who tells us he's gonna do a repair job...on the results of our trip down DISMAL LANE !!
KennesawJack| 6.25.11 @ 12:40PM
I think we're too far along the road to ruin to reverse course. I wish it weren't so, but I believe it is. Galt's Gulch will one day be found but it will be outside the U. S. We have created a dependency class large enough to hold political sway so, at the end of the day, our 60 year flirtation with fascism has now become an inseparable love affair. The future for this country is dystopic - more like Anthem than Atlas Shrugged.
Shamus| 6.25.11 @ 12:53PM
Education in the US is declining. The country will probably also decline.
MarkJ| 6.25.11 @ 2:20PM
The day the "gummint" will finally get serious about locking down the borders is the day it becomes more worried about legal citizens leaving the country than illegals entering it.
Chris| 6.27.11 @ 8:08AM
Excellent point. Shades of the Soviet Union.
bobmontgomery| 6.25.11 @ 3:05PM
The day that 'fiscal conservatives' come to realize that social conservatism is their last, best hope is the day the brakes get applied. Madison Avenue is starving itself.
megapotamus| 6.25.11 @ 4:22PM
First things first: Rand couldn't write worth a damn. Whether it is the prose, the settings, the characters or the (cough) plot, it was all an embarrassing mess. That said, she was right on the big picture economics but quite wrong in the details, where the devils are. Going Galt, (a crapulent cliche the moment it was written) was a misapprehension in scale and moral probity. Sure, I guess it is possible that someone looking like Montgomery Clift and with multiple engineering degrees could be the lynch pin of some industry without whom it cannot function but it's pretty unlikely and if it were so, the idea of him abandoning the nation for a hole in the ground is kookoo for Cocoa Puffs. In reality Galtism is much broader and deeper. It doesn't take some kind of ideological commitment or even knowledge to change your behavior adversely in response to economic conditions. It only takes the economic conditions. Outside of the Professional Left (the only lasting Gibbsism) everyone has to play by the same rules and in the same muck. I don't care if you were an Organizing for Obama charter member, you still have to pay your mortgage, car note and utilities. The downturn is hardly any less severe for the Marxist sociology professor than it is for Ron Paul. This is heartening, I should think. No need to look for Galt (Rand was also dreadful at naming her vapid heroes). He is all around you. Even your pesky O-bot brother-in-law is feeling the pinch and will be pinched harder yet. And needless to add, the "solutions" of the wreckers and parasites only make things worse for everyone and at a viciously logarithmic acceleration. We will nearly all hit the wall at the same time. Not great news, I guess, but it beats being Left Behind.
Handy| 6.25.11 @ 5:17PM
mega,
You just don't see it yet. The Galts and Reardons and D'Anconias have already left the stage. All who remain are totally incompetent, corrupt, or both.
Atlas shrugged a long time ago. Then, he walked away. He's not going to return any time soon.
Also, you might want to work on your paragraphing skills before you start criticizing one of the most brilliant writers of all time.
Euphemia| 6.26.11 @ 5:49PM
Megopotamus, I've heard many times from people who, like you, express themselves in less than simplistic terms that Rand was a terrible writer. As a long ago Lit. major, I've read tons and, while there are problems with point of view, etc., I'd have a hard time saying she couldn't write worth a damn or faulting her for plot and characterisation in particular (Galt and Dagny excluded). Would you care to be more specific in your critique? Or name an author you favor? Personal curiosity on my part. Feel free to respond outside the public arena: euphemia dot arends at gmail dot com
Handy| 6.27.11 @ 2:13AM
Megapot is 0ne toke over the line, Sweet Jesus, one toke over the line.
Jack Rail| 6.25.11 @ 11:32PM
Atlas has been shrugging for over a decade. He isn't usually a rich kid like Francisco D'Antonia or a genius like John Galt, but rather an engineer or a talented but uneducated person who can "do things."
Handy| 6.25.11 @ 11:43PM
How right you are. Precisely.
Kingofthenet| 6.26.11 @ 9:11PM
Conservative's and Libertarians LOVE Ayn Rand. They REALLY want that model in American Govt. Want to pay a worker 10 cents an hour, FINE, Want to Pollute with ZERO penalties, Fine ,Child Labor OK, indentured Servitude? Why Not! Why should I, as a smart, rich Rethug have to treat and ACT like the riff-raff, so I killed one Drunk Driving, pay a little fine for the WORTHLESS life I took and move on...
Handy| 6.26.11 @ 10:27PM
I worked as a janitor in a factory owned by the richest guy in town. One night, while working alone I noticed a hydrualic leak, so I repaired it. Bad move on my part. The union found out and I had to be fired.
A few months later another leak happened. This time, the union janitor couldn't fix it, and the plant burned down. Goodbye capital. Goodbye to all the labor that capital employed.
Oh yeah. That union janitor was hailed as a hero because he called the fire department. It was in the news, and he got over $10 K as a reward.
Two years later he died in an apartment fire that he started while he was drunk. Took five innocents from the upper floors with him.
Ya just gotta love socialism and the unions.
Oh, and self-appointed Kings.
Bob the Engineer| 6.27.11 @ 5:34AM
I will take my chances with wide open free market capitalism any day. An employer who tries to pay his workers ten cents per hour will not have any employees except the kind he deserves. Socialism is Slavery! People that preach class envy are the real thugs because they will force the heroes of our economy, the productive, to go Galt. Ayn Rand was describing Class Warfare and the dystopia that results from it.
Louis Tully| 6.27.11 @ 9:43AM
Don't worry about the Brain Drain. The GOP is teaming up with the Dems to insure that the country has a limitless supply of illegals to cut our grass and flip our burgers. That's a great trade, isn't it?
There's another reason some people have left and many others are looking into it. The two political parties--both of them--are corrupt to the core and offer no hope whatever that the nation's slide to socialism can be reversed.
iyamwutiam| 6.28.11 @ 10:41PM
I tend to agree with Megapotamus and listing a degree in anything in this decade of education inflation is hardly the point of credibility and insight -imo (especially on the internet).
What Rand and so many 'Master's of the Universe' forget is in essence the old Socratic dialogue of Sheperd or his flock -who controls whom. Its conclusion still stands today -that in reality it is the flock who controls the Shepard.
In this division of labor society there are few equipped to have a pantheon of skills to create from scratch something -anything. How would you create those wonderful schematics -if you had to grow your own wheat, mill it, deliver it , etc for all your 'consumables' and 'necessities'.
How does one justify that because he 'discovered' "something" that the contributions of the symbiotic whole from which he was able to subsist or survive or best yet create then by virtue of pathological greed and narcissism fervently be dismissed as lacking foundation -because 'obviously I was special'.
Unfortunately a great majority of 'special' people are not special. George Washington Carver was special inventing green plastics a 100 years ago. Tesla was special. Most of us are but some degree of the messy whole and participation in the mess only further compunds it.
People must be able to step away from the noise and see things as they really are -inter-related and complementary -not a single minded quest for self-gratification with obscene amounts of money, power, lust, drugs and did I say power?
All this talk -discovering it -doesn't do squat for you (ask Tesla -who mysteriously lost his mind, his fortune and everything - to a sudden onset of psychosis -coincidently after deals with Westinghouse).
Why should a bum -who is good at pushigng around other people and lying -be paid many more times than the legion of manufactured PhD's that work busily to prove that while quality is always preferred -it can be at least maintained and incrementally improved upon by the sheer mass of people who have invested themselves to learn this for 'financial' security.
But these people are also part of the symbiotic whole -and the point is -no CEO should get millions -Very rarely do we find a mind that is of sound understanding and can create far beyond what is peers can see. Once created -its only a matter of decades and reverse engineering and legions of Ph'Ds.
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