More Interest

I note with pleasure that the notion of “going John Galt” is being commented on by two of my absolute favorite bloggers, Megan McArdle and Will Wilkinson. While I disagree with each on some of their ethical and political positions, their deep intelligence and humor is evident in their thoughtful analyses of human psychology and economics.

While Megan posts on the worthwhile point that Ayn Rand partly knew what she was talking about because she had witnessed society collapse during her childhood, Will takes a look at the motives for “going galt” and whether or not they fit the likely outcomes. He endorses the notion as an expressive act, to a point, but cautions that we are certainly almost unanimously Eddie Willerss, not Galts.

True enough.  But I’d add a little more to the exploration of the concept. For starters, I think the personal dimension of “going Galt” is as important to most people who talk of scaling back as the, let’s call it, punitive dimension.  Most of us know that the larger society would hardy notice the absence of one of us, but that one person might still judge their personal strike to be a net benefit; I might rightly derive relative happiness from no longer contributing to society’s decline even if the decline continues unabated and unaffected by my lack of contribution.  

More significant to an analysis of the social consequences is the relationship between labor supply and tax rates. Leaving aside any consideration of whether or not a large impact could be achieved by a few key individuals striking, there remains the noticeable aggregate response of millions of ordinary people just feeling like that next hour of overtime (or that promotion, or that new job) is worth the effort. And of course the size of that response is not only a function of the tax rate alone, but culture and individual psychology. What I’m seeking to accomplish through being vocal and public and proud is to increase the size of the response, to encourage others to take more pride in the value they create, and to be less sanguine about the next dollar that gets expropriated.

Will echoes a point I’ve heard from other skeptics and detractors in his post:

But insofar as this is all about taxes on the wealthy (as the link to Malkin suggests) it’s a bit hard to see tax rates somewhat exceeding the Clinton era’s as a move over some inflection point from the tolerable to the completely outrageous.

He’s quite correct to say that the rates themselves do not justify the rhetoric we’re observing (and producing ) compared to our prior silence (speaking for myself). But the truth is that to my current mindset, the prior rates were also intolerable. For me personally, the October bailouts were the final straw, the moment I realized that things were not going to get better without a more extreme response. Some people had already realized it, and it appears that a few more realized it after the November elections, and a whole bunch more after the current stimulus package passed.  

The culture is changing; what’s happening here is both a symptom of the change, and an agent of it. None of us may be Atlas, but we might just be Archimedes, shifting the world toward the good with a fulcrum of individualism and a moment arm of pride.