Going Galt

Here's a compilation of buzz over Atlas Shrugged - The Reality.

There’s a new craze hitting the conservative tubes on the Internets these days: “Going Galt!” While it’s difficult to identify an exact date of reference or to provide any unique person with credit for the general meme, Michelle Malkin and Helen Smith certainly deserve honorable mention for recently popularizing the phrase.

Economist Megan McArdle notes Rand's uncanny prophetic abilities:

She was able to describe these things so well, of course, because she’d seen what an economy looked like while it was being wrecked. All of Rand’s writing is dominated by the fact that she lived through the birth pangs of Soviet Russia, and saw her family’s business destroyed by Lenin’s ideology, and extraordinarily incompetent economic management.

Will Wilkinson is reluctant to catch the fever:

I can’t help but feel that threatening to withdraw from economic production, ala Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt, is a certain kind of libertarian-conservative’s version of progressives threatening to move to Canada. For my part, I can’t imagine what would make me want to stop working, and each new president makes me want to move to Canada.

But they don't really make him want to move to Canada, do they? Or he would have left by now.

No one wants to leave,
but many feel it would strike a chord,
to heave
some tea overboard.