Who is John Galt?? ?

Question

Okay I already know who he is... Read the book "Atlas Shrugged" (aka WTF?) and wanted to know if anyone agreed with Mr. Galt's god-awful long speech about how people's intellectual properties should only belong to the intellectuals...

Answer 1

"We're on strike against your creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. If you want to know how I made them quit, I told them exactly what I'm telling you tonight. I taught them the morality of Reason -- that it was right to pursue one's own happiness as one's principal goal in life. I don't consider the pleasure of others my goal in life, nor do I consider my pleasure the goal of anyone else's life.

"I am a trader. I earn what I get in trade for what I produce. I ask for nothing more or nothing less than what I earn. That is justice. I don't force anyone to trade with me; I only trade for mutual benefit. Force is the great evil that has no place in a rational world. One may never force another human to act against his/her judgment. If you deny a man's right to Reason, you must also deny your right to your own judgment. Yet you have allowed your world to be run by means of force, by men who claim that fear and joy are equal incentives, but that fear and force are more practical. "

http://www.working-minds.com/galtmini.ht...

These are the tenets of a man who recognized the unalienable rights of every individual human, not just of "intellectuals." I don't know how you get "intellectuals" from Galt's speech, when through out the entire book Dagny and Reardon are driving through the countryside looking at the dilapidated houses and the starving people, and wondering how they could have been brought to this situation by their leaders, whom they trusted.

It is against the elite who believe they know what's best for the people that Galt deplores. Under Rand's system of laissez faire capitalism, every man and woman under the system would have the RIGHT, as opposed to "being allowed by government," to do whatever, I repeat WHATEVER he/she wanted to do with their life, their minds, their property so long as they did not use the initiation of force to overwhelm the same rights as another person.

Equality comes from the freedom from the coercion of government, but government ideas come from the elite who gain power and twist the Constitution to mean what they want it to mean.

Did you ever stop to wonder why our government has such power over us, when the Founders clearly meant to limit such power?

It is because the defenders of the newly freed black race had their backs against the wall as to what to do. The elites forced them to accept, in the 14 Amendment, the new concept of "citizens of the United States," a class of citizen which until then did not exist.

That class of citizen is directly under the control of the Federal Government, and THAT is what Rand's book is about--the loss of reason and sanity in the control of people.

"Your acceptance of the code of selflessness has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he's keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab."

Galt is speaking to the altruist in all of us, not the rational intellectuals who understand the purpose of Galt's Gulch, and not to the common man who understands why the leaders of industry have disappeared. The common man who understands that cheers, in Atlas Shrugged, for the leaders who abdicate their power to the power-hungry elites. Those common people understand, and part of Galt's speech is to vindicate them.

In parts of the speech he speaks directly to them, telling them they are not morally wrong, that they are right, and that when the elites get their heads out of their as*es, the leaders of industry will return.

You need to read the book, not just take the speech out of context without seeing the miserable way in which the common people are living, and the compassion the book's heros have for those people. The character of Eddie Willers was purposefully meant to represent them--you--with dignity and grace.

Let's hope you get some common sense of your own and wake up to the freedoms Rand was trying to instill in you. She was Jefferson, she was Thomas Paine, she was Madison, she was the Federalist Papers, she was the Constitution.

"Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government."

"A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free—a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

"The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government."

“The Nature of Government,” The Virtue of Selfishness

"Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document—the Constitution—which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on whim. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all the other kinds of governments—unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions—demonstrates the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was built."

“Censorship: Local and Express,” Philosophy: Who Needs It

"The clause giving Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce is one of the major errors in the Constitution. That clause, more than any other, was the crack in the Constitution’s foundation, the entering wedge of statism, which permitted the gradual establishment of the welfare state. But I would venture to say that the framers of the Constitution could not have conceived of what that clause has now become. If, in writing it, one of their goals was to facilitate the flow of trade and prevent the establishment of trade barriers among the states, that clause has reached the opposite destination."

“Censorship: Local and Express,” Philosophy: Who Needs It,

All quotes by Rand

Answer 2

I once wrote a paper about all the different ways I thought Ayn Rand was a complete lunatic. So no, I don't agree. I am however very proud of myself for finishing that rambling, too d**n long monument to an over-inflated ego.