I asked a few questions at that time:
Take a good hard look at that graphic. I mean really look at who supports America.
Who pays for national defense and homeland security, good schools and a crumbling infrastructure, the upcoming costs of Social Security?
In an amazing show of complete short sightedness, the socialists of this word, the Hillary Clinton's who say we are going to take from the rich for the "common good", taken directly from the communist manifesto, the Salon idiots that suggest we steal more from the rich but never once ask themselves, what if the rich of this world, the ones that pay 96.54% of everything, the ones that employ millions of people, the ones that provide health insurance to millions of people.... no longer cared to do so?
[SNIP]
What then?
Who would be left to pay for the food stamps of the employees that would no longer have jobs?
Who would be left to pay for the healthcare of those employees that would no longer have it provided by those rich they just suggested leave and do not come back?
Who would be left to pay that 96.54% revenue that our country is now receiving from the top 50% of wage earners?
Who would be left to pay for national defense?
Who would be left to pay for homeland security?
Who would be left to pay for good schools?
Who would be left to pay for crumbling infrastructure?
Who would be left to pay for upcoming costs of Social Security?
Easy to talk big and say let them leave, but I do not see anyone addressing who would be left to make up for that revenue?
Atlas Shrugged was first published in 1957 and according to news sources, in 2009 it is selling at triple the rate it sold at in the beginning of 2008.
The main hero, out of many in the book, is John Galt. The man that said "enough" and determined to stop the motor of the world. Take the men and women that produced, employed, and supported our country and see where that left those that would have continued to leech off them.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, explained the parallels between Atlas Shrugged and today’s events.
“In Atlas Shrugged, Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?”
Brook also stressed the importance today of the book’s often overlooked message that capitalism cannot be properly defended without morally defending profit and self-interest: “. . . only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism--and that as long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention--and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.”
A piece written recently over at Pajamas Media, reminded me of Atlas Shrugged, a book I have had on my bookshelf since my mother gave me my first copy when I was 18 years old.
The PJM piece is headlined with "A message to the rich" and that message is the almost the exact message that John Galt, in the book, gave to those people that carried the weight of the world on their shoulders when he told them to "shrug" it off.
So let me now send a personal message to The Rich in America…
As an American and a patriot, I implore you – I go to my knees and beg you – LEAVE NOW.
Leave. Just go away. Retire to the Cayman Islands or Bermuda or wherever, but do it now, please, while you still have some love for this country. Close your companies, fire your employees, shutter your factories and offices, sell your property, and take all of that somewhere else… better yet: somewhere scenic but poverty-stricken. Somewhere that could use some wealth creation. Somewhere that people simply are grateful to have a job in the first place. Somewhere where you will be appreciated.
You are not welcome in America any more. Take your wealth and prosperity and inventiveness and hard work and vision and insight and bold risk-taking and joy in seeing growth and wealth creation and just go away – right now, before it’s too late. Because if you stay, Joel Berg and Barack Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd will continue to come after you for more and more and more and they will not ever stop – not ever – until you are forced to flee. And when that day comes, you will go with not with fond remembrances and a desire to return home, but rather a black heart and hard and bitter memories.
So on behalf of those few of us who still believe in the Land of Opportunity, I beg you and implore you, in the name of our common patriot ancestors who worked so hard and sacrificed so much so that we could become so spoiled and ungrateful: take your 60% of the total income taxes and just go away.
Because if you do, then there will no longer be an Enemy for the Left to stick it to. Then, perhaps, the half of the country that pays no income tax might have to put some skin in the game. Then, perhaps, with most of the wealth generation gone we will turn to our community organizers to provide the wealth creation, and the tax dollars, and the innovation. When you have gone the President of the United States, supported by an army of little acorns like Joel Berg, will have to start calling for the rest of us to be taxed more to address the inequality gap.
That’s what I want.
You see, I’ve actually been there. I have experienced this pathology from the inside.
Read the whole thing from a man that says he was one of those "leeches" that thought it was his right to take from those that produced by virtue of his inability TO produce for himself. A man that finally got his act together and realized he needed to stop being a leech.
He explains the pathology of what this country is suffering now.
I have written about Atlas Shrugged multiple times, quoting specific portions from the book in the Anniversary piece I wrote showing the multiple faces of the book.
Quotation from Atlas Shrugged:
If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?
I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?
To shrug.
That is Whittle, from PJM is telling the rich to do now, to shrug, to abandon those that think it is their right to take, by force, the hard earned money and work of another, for the benefit of those that cannot or will not produce.
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