Going Galt

On Friday night, I had the privilege to hear Bill Kristol speak as the dinner keynote speaker at the 2009 Leadership Program of the Rockies Annual Retreat.

In brief, Mr. Kristol’s argument (as I understood it…he might say I misunderstood him) was that while he did not want to play down the bad situation the nation and the political prospects for conservatives are in today, he is fairly optimistic that both, but particularly the latter will recover in a reasonable time frame, and that the Republican Party will adopt good ideas which percolate up from grassroots political activists and thinkers outside the usual conservative channels.

A well-known conservative blogger (who will remain nameless) asked me what I thought of Mr. Kristol’s remarks. And after a brief time considering the question (which, strangely, I hadn’t spent time considering before the person asked), I have reached a several-part answer:

First, I’m less optimistic than Mr. Kristol that the national situation will improve in any important way for at least 6 more months, but more likely 12-18 months. In other words, I think this will shatter all records for post-WWII recessions.

Second, I’m somewhat less optimistic that even a slightly longer-than average economic downturn will help Republican prospects as much as one might expect unless the Republicans stay as united as fiscal conservatives as the House GOP did on the “stimulus” bill…and I don’t expect that to happen, particularly not in the Senate.

Third, I am highly skeptical that Republican leadership, which includes so many of the old guard, are capable of getting through their thick skulls that my prior point is correct. If they did get it, they would have massively arm-twisted their caucus members to remove their earmarks from the budget bill now being debated, so they could claim something like “over 90% of the earmarks in the proposed budget are from Democrats” instead of the current case which is roughly 60% from Democrats and 40% from Republicans. I doubt they will be open (especially on the Senate side, again) to ground-breaking new ideas which come from outside the beltway.

Finally, thinking back on all this, I occurs to me – and keep in mind that I’m a person whose son’s middle name is Rand – that I’m not certain I want things in the nation to suddenly start improving, i.e. to improve in a way that could let progressives argue that Obama’s reprehensible generational theft in the form of Keynsian spending and stimulus bills actually caused a beneficial economic outcome.

It would be like the Democrats who argue that Clinton’s tax hike was a good thing, economically speaking, because the economy improved afterward, despite that being so obviously a falsehood, an impossibility, that only a “progressive” could believe it. (“Progressive” is Latin for “I never studied economics, but I’m pretty certain I’m smarter than you are”.) Instead, there are other factors in the economy which can (and did) in concert overwhelm the income tax rate hike. (It bears mentioning that Clinton passed a large capital gains tax cut, which few liberals ever talk about when discussing the effect of Clinton’s tax policy on the economy.)

This is not easy to say or think…but at the end of the day, I go further than Rush Limbaugh as far as wanting Obama to fail.

I don’t want the nation to fail. Unlike Michelle Obama and, in my view, our President, I love my country. After all, wanting to remake something completely is hardly a sign of deep love and appreciation for it. But if having things be a little worse for a little longer, or even substantially worse for substantially longer, might be the difference between people believing in Keynsianism and people realizing that Obama’s New New Deal and its predecessor were economic disasters based on an obviously flawed theoretical foundation, I think the price is worth our paying. For the sake of our children and grandchildren, I want “progressive” economic thinking to be so thoroughly disproved that future generations won’t get hoodwinked by promises of “hope” and “change” like so many economically illiterate Americans did in November.

I will suffer through one or two worse years if it means my descendants won’t be put through a second Barack Obama (or, roughly, a third Jimmy Carter.)

It’s great to see discussions on the web of people “going Galt.” If enough productive members of society decide that it’s simply not worth the risk and effort to strive for the next dollar, it is not primarily they who will suffer economically. It is those who believe in redistribution, who believe that Obama would and should make “government” pay her rent (and we thought she was insane when she said that – turns out she was psychic.) Those so interested in being recipients of government redistribution of wealth, the “looters” and the “moochers” as Ayn Rand calls them in Atlas Shrugged, just let them try to redistribute income from people who simply quit working because we’re not willing to be looted and mooched from. Yes, we are living Atlas Shrugged, and we might as well not quit halfway through the story.

I’ve done this once already…I moved out of the US for nearly 2 years after Bill Clinton raised tax rates, and moved back just in time for the capital gains tax cut. Let me be clear: I gave up two years of at least $200,000 (but probably a fair bit more) per year, just so I didn’t have to pay taxes to Bill Clinton’s government. My money is where my mouth is in a way that few people can claim. And Clinton was a piker and a conservative in comparison to Obama.

So, in case I haven’t been clear enough: As long as we’re already going to have a fairly bad recession, I’m saying let it be worse and longer. Let more people be persistently unemployed, let the economy drag along the sludge-laden bottom of the progressive sewer, let businesses close down or move overseas, let tens or hundreds of thousands of capable people publicly declare how excessive taxation and regulation is causing them to work less, take less risk, and employ fewer Americans, and finally let people recognize that capitalists are not a “necessary evil” but rather that they are a necessary good.

Most people don’t learn truly important lessons unless they are taught in an expensive or painful way. A once-and-for-all repudiation of Keynsianism is a lesson that is too important not to be learned in such a way.

Many people who have survived cancer say that the chemotherapy was so bad, they almost wish the cancer had just killed them. But any treatment that didn’t make them nearly wish for death would not cure the disease, which would often recur with a greater chance of killing the patient the second time around. And so it is with the recurrent national cancers that are Keynsianism and the politicians who impose it. The New Deal sickened the nation. Obama’s New New Deal could kill it, but the chemotherapy of a recession severe enough to cause voters to say “never again” might just save the patient – even if the patient might wish to die during the treatment.

Therefore, I proudly proclaim I want Obama to fail, even if it means temporary substantial hardship for the nation. The Keynsian cancer must be cured, once and for all.

Let us all be John Galt.