No Galt

Dr. Helen wonders if we should go Galt. I left the following monster comment, because I'm a hack without manners or style:

The coming government will be more "progressive" than its citizens.
-- The left-liberals took over the Democratic party.
-- The Democrats are winning because the Republicans were unprincipled spenders who ignored their duties.
-- Even the good ones hardly understand their principles -- if McCain will pay off overextended borrowers, well, the improvement over Obama is marginal at best.
-- The press don't understand either, and look for conventional wisdom that can be safely repeated.

And still McCain was winning on character before the bailout demonstrated executive and legislative incompetence. We might know the Democrats can be worse, but the less alert probably find it hard to imagine.

A Galt Strike attacks a _society_ that insists on taking. Ours is a free working society inherited from immigrants, whose government is momentarily seized by political entrepreneurs. The solution is to take back those institutions, starting with a Republican party. The electorate will choose self-reliance and freedom, but it has to be offered truly and fairly.

And a Galt Strike imagines that a reasonable government emerges naturally, as people learn their lesson. It won't. Abuse of power is the most natural human instinct. _Every_ democracy is vulnerable to politicians adapting moral arguments to justify expansion of their powers. The true principles of the civil rights movement are as subject to political misappropriation as the medieval Church.

A free society requires constant resistance against status accumulation by political entrepreneurs, and vigilance against their innovations. And yet government must still adapt to real changes in technology, demographics and trade, and society must still reject any real errors conserved in its institutions. Government isn't easy, and while its principles maybe "natural", their actual enactment isn't.

It's not enough for the Galts to produce economically. They have to produce politically, too.