The strikers will be only those with ethics because they are the ones with the most to lose. They are at the top of the economic food chain.
In an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., PRI senior fellow in Business and Economic Studies, argues [in a report] that vast government spending is not a cure for the U.S. recession. Dr. Murphy explains that the true purpose of an economic system isn’t to “create jobs” or channel a particular number of green pieces of paper into everyone’s wallet on payday, but that workers are employed productively, so that they take scarce resources and transform them into goods and services that consumers value.
“The price of limiting economic freedom is real, but not always apparent or easily understood by [ ] by lawmakers,” said Lawrence J. McQuillan, Ph.D., co-author of the report and director of Business and Economic Studies at PRI." PRI
It is not easily understood by business itself, apparently. After taking government money that essentially made government an invested stockholder, the bonus-paying, romper-room, jet-buying antics of those businesses have forced government to cap the pay of future recipients.
"Many of us who know [Ayn] Rand's work," wrote Stephen Moore in an op-ed, "have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that Atlas Shrugged parodied in 1957, when this 1,000+ page novel was first published and became an instant hit." [emphasis added]
"For the uninitiated," Moore continues, "the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism."
Not only did the politicians, using the code phrases "for the public good," "the redistribution of wealth," and others, create a downward spiral, the very spiral we are on now, but they created two new classes of Americans: the looters and the strikers.
The looters were those who, like the corporations who are now taking government money, took government money. Looters were also people as individuals who fed off this constant stream of government handouts to the needy. The government itself was the prime looter, because it took from those who produced the wealth in order to give to those who sucked the life out the productive workers.
The strikers were those who refused to play the game any longer. At first they were only the top executives of major companies, and only those who had ethics. Those who had no ethics, like the bank execs we have now who take multi-million dollar bonuses after wrecking their companys, had no reason to go on strike. If they played the game right, they would still eventually get their money.
In Atlas Shrugged, the main visable protaganist is a woman who runs the nation's major railroad, at a time in our history when railroads played a much larger role in the economy. The train could be said to be a metaphor for what happens in the plot, because the looters' train is out of control running downhill with no breaks.
The strikers are only those with ethics because they are the ones with the most to lose. The are at the top of the economic food chain. Everyone below them feeds off them. When they begin to strike, disappearing apparently from the face of the earth, untraceable, unreachable, then the execs without ethics are stuck at the top of the economic food chain.
No one has yet become a striker that I know of. But its going to happen. It happened in the great "Brain Drain"* from England in the 1960's, when the brains moved to freer nations. "The term was coined by the Royal Society to describe the emigration of "scientists and technologists" to North America from post-war Europe." [* see [1] [2] [3]]
But in Atlas Shrugged, some of the "brains" the keep the economy afloat are literally invited to strike, and are given a safe haven. Some, who don't know of this safe haven, strike on their own by retiring without explanation.
The moral of this blog is to point out that what is about to happen to this country and to the world, as long and as far as this bail-out is continued, will cause everything in the novel to come to fruition.
The only means of rescuing the world from the abomination of spending-stimulus packages, especially those filled with "social" programs, is to take the advice of the 200+ economists who disagree with President Obama and with the force behind the strike in the novel: "Get Out Of Our Way!"
...big government as epitomized by Obama's ideas thinks that causing business to spend and then to lose money is a good policy...
In one of President Obama's first outright, overt attempts to redistribute the wealth from those who have to those who were too lazy over the last 14 months to purchase--with Federal Assistance Rebates--their hdtv converters, he wants to delay the February 17th transition to the new broadcasting frequencies.
Neowin.net reported Obama made it clear that to him, "many Americans are not ready for the switch. The cut off date was scheduled for February 17, 2009 in America, which was to free up airwaves for emergency services.
"'We are extremely pleased the incoming administration is supportive of consumer efforts to ensure that the poor, elderly and rural consumers do not face economic hardship as we move broadcasting to digital transmission," said Gene Kimmelman, vice president for federal policy for Consumers Union.'" Neowin.net
Those Kimmelman is speaking of are the have-nots. Redistributing the wealth to them would be in the form of billions of dollars lost from first responders whose frequencies will change to the old TV frequencies and were ready to make the switch; and broadcasting companies who did not budget nor prepare to run two transmitters at the same time. Are advertisers ready to pick up the tab to run their commercials for another four months on not one, but two, frequencies at the same time?
"As it stands now the FCC will not be backing down on its initial plan of February 17th unless Congress passes a judgment delaying the transition. As we get closer to the deadline the fighting will most likely intensify but at the end of the day the broadcasters already have plans in place to remove the old analog technology, the FCC has sold off the spectrum, it has advertised heavily for the transition and should not be delayed because a small minority procrastinated to upgrade their technology."
The billions of dollars already spent, compared to the loss that will be suffered by the procrastinators, is already money ready well spent, spent being the operative word.
In these hard economic times when big government as epitomized by Obama's ideas thinks that causing business to spend and then to lose money is a good policy, we can understand why President Reagan said big government is the problem.
The government had the absolute right to upgrade to the superior frequencies that will be used by TV broadcasters, in order to sell the old frequencies to other services who severly needed new ones.
But after delaying the transition for years because of technology problems, and then setting a date by which time billions of dollars have already been spent, that same government has no right to squander the money of the very capitalists who are going to help pay off the huge debts run up by Presidents Bush and Obama.
NOTE: "I do not want Obama to succeed."
On Wednesday, January 21, Rush Limbaugh explicitly stated about Obama, "I hope he fails."
The day before, in a blog about "lost art of communication" and saying what you mean, I published these words of my own:
"A President is [ ] a looter if he creates debt for future generations, robbing them of their ability to be free of the slavery of that debt. Our children and grandchildren, and probably our great-grandchildren, in other words our posterity, will be born as indendured servants of the IRS, or of whatever government agency is collecting the debt-reduction taxes in the future.
"That indenture may prevent our posterity from their own pursuit of happiness.
"The only people who want to see socialism succeed are
those who don't see [ ] that the fortune of America and its people is not made by redistributing wealth, but rather by its creation."
I am not one of those people who "does not see," and neither is Rush Limbaugh. I don't want our new President to succeed, either.
If he fails, I wrote, perhaps we will then get a President who is rooting for outright capitalism.
How soon before the second hand stores, the used car dealerships, and the higher-priced food markets have shortages caused by the redistribution of the powers of the free market into the powers of social engineers?
The Environmental Protection Agency published this: "Sustainability means 'meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.'"
On the surface there seems nothing wrong and everything right about this definition. To discover what is wrong you simply need to click on the live link above, provided by the EPA, to read this: "...economic development must be ecologically viable now and in the long run."
No one denies the environment must be kept clean. I remember when Lake Superior was considered a "dead" lake, and the naysayers said nothing would fix it. The algae had taken over, and what fish were left in it were inedible and toxic. Science and the law went to work on it.
Now, "The average underwater visibility of Lake Superior is 27 feet, making it easily the cleanest and clearest of the Great Lakes. Underwater visibility in places reaches 100 feet. Lake Superior has been described as "the most oligotrophic lake in the world." from Lake Superior Facts
Conservatives attempt to limit such "ecological viability" by pointing out the insanity of protecting--for example--a species of frog, when that protection prevents the ability of current generations to meet their own needs, or when it actually costs a land owner the rights associated with his own lost capital when he is told to set aside the land declared protected.
The government has been guilty for decades of both environmental and social engineering that is based on political ends. The government has political ends that may not reflect the needs or protect the rights of its citizens to control their own resources--a political end that is precisely defined as "socialism"--a system that "relies on control of the means of production by the state, either through state ownership or regulation."Wikipedia
The Sustainability Institute is a private enterprise who's "staff includes biologists, writers, social scientists, system dynamics modelers, and facilitators." The "means of production" is the system designed by the owner of the capital and the resources to produce. The Sustainability Institute may employ social scientists and others who share the government's political, social, and scientific policies, but not their methods. You would never hear the government say, "We conduct stakeholder-based systems analysis..."[all emphases added]
That "stakeholder" is the capitalist and/or the owner of the means of production. Metaphysical naturalism (MN) comprehends that have a stake in one's own means of sustaining one's own philosophy, not to mention one's own life and health, means capitalism. MN specifically accepts capitalism as the only moral means of conducting the affairs of one's property. Even giving it away in philanthropy or in inheritance is according to the rights of capital; having the methods of distributing and using one's capital defined and altered by anyone but the owner can only be done at the point of a gun. Only the government has that gun.
Friends of the Earth International is typical of the sort of organization that helps shape government policies by lobbying toward environmental "sustainability," with mission statements such as, "...people’s environmental rights include access to the unspoiled natural resources that enable survival such as land, shelter, food, water and air."
Again, this doesn't sound bad on the surface. But ask these questions: which people have these rights; who defines what "unspoiled" means; "rightful access" is to who's land; whose shelter, whose food, water, and air? That "rightful access to land" must necessarily be to someone else's land, because the Friends of the Earth are certainly not the land owners to who's property they want "access."
How do unspoiled natural resources enable survival access to shelter and food? Does it mean forcing people to return to a time when we were nomads picking our food from the trees we did not nurture? If it does not mean this, you wouldn't know it, because the only other alternative is the one the Friends don't state: "survival" to them means the redistribution of the wealth of resources, from the owners, into the hand of the "looters." The Friends are "looters."
"If some men attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing. Such looters are parasites incapable of survival, who exist by destroying those who are capable, those who are pursuing a course of action proper to man." “What Is Capitalism?” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal Ayn Rand
"In our vision," writes Friends of the Earth, "environmental rights also include rights for indigenous peoples and other collectivities [looters], the right to information and participation in decision-making, freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to resist unwanted developments.
"We also believe in the right to claim reparations for violated rights, including rights for climate refugees and others displaced due to environmental destruction, the right to claim ecological debt, and the right to environmental justice." [all emphases added]
Again, ask yourself questions: why do collectives have priority over the individual sovereignty of those who own the capital and the resources; how is one's right to speak freely about unwanted developments affected so that it must be demanded; why do the demands about developments unwanted by collectives take precedence over the owner of the capital, the resources, and the means of production; does the right to participation in decision-making mean decisions over privately owned resources, or only over publicly-held resources; how does the First Amendment not apply in such a way that it needs to be demanded as applicable; what are "ecological debts" and "environmental justice," and against whom are they levied?
To be sure, not all government-engineered "sustainability" and "viability" has to do with the environment. It has taken a strange swing lately, in the direction of the automobile and energy industries. President-elect Obama, Congressmen, Senators, and even auto and energy executives have talked about the need for sustainability in those industries.
But it is one thing for private industry to speak in terms of saving their own livelihoods and those of their employees; it is quite another when they go begging for government handouts and promise to allow a "car czar" and an "energy czar" to carry out the virtually-socialistic duty of determining whether their industries are meeting government standards, or solving the economic problems themselves by letting the consumers and the markets determine what is "sustainable."
It is obvious that those two industries, as only two of many examples, believed the sky would never fall on them. But a quicker way to economic viability for the entire nation--and in a domino effect the rest of the world--is to let the economy fix itself.
Modern liberals see the Constitution as a "living document" instead of the concretized ideas of forward-thinking Renaissance liberals. They see the earth itself as "living" even as they know that what they paint as living is really only the processes of nature.
Of course frogs and pandas and salmon and flowers and trees are alive; but rivers, glaciers, the ozone layer, and methane from farting cows come from processes of nature, and they do not have rights. The rights of living things that are not homo sapien do not take precedence over the rights of living homo sapiens unless, as Keanu Reeves insanely made clear they did in his version of "The Day the Earth Stood Still", someone with political power (the power of the gun) holds a gun to the heads of people who believe in unalienable sovereignty and force them to act in a manner consistent with progressive liberalism, i.e., some form of collectivism.
The 2009 version of "Stood Still" could have been scripted by an apologist for the Friends of the Earth.
"Government-engineered sustainability" was what the Soviet Union attempted for nearly 80 years. Millions of people starved to death, or froze to death.
Food prices in the U.S. have skyrocketed because sustainability in the auto energy industry was thought by the Bush Administration to be in bio-fuels. This has pushed up the costs of everything that has corn in it--including automobiles themselves--and everything that has wheat in it, because wheat was forsaken by farmers for the subsidies paid them by government to grow corn.
Here in Michigan jobs were created by the construction of at least four bio-fuel plants and the labor to operate them, and corn farmers made profits. But it came at the expense of the cost of groceries and prepared foods and thus from the budgets of those who could no longer afford to purchase "luxury" items and go out to eat once in a while, let alone afford brand new clothes and shoes for their children. Sales at second-hand stores has skyrocketed, while sales at nearly every other store except WalMart has gone down considerably, and even WalMart says it did not see the gains it expected.
Now the Obama Administration wants to engineer the same sort of "sustainability" in the other energy markets. None of it will be done by the demands of the market, any more than bio-fuels were done by the demands of the market. The desires of those who control the markets as seen in market demands are thwarted by engineering government policies.
How soon will it be before the second hand stores, the used car dealerships, and the higher-priced food markets have either no more products to sell or cannot afford to sustain their own markets because of shortages caused by the redistribution of the powers of the market from those who have the capital and the means of production, to those who think they know what is best for "the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"?
As it stands now, at least the next two to three generations will be paying down the debts of the bailout schemes that do not allow the free market to be free. How can any future generation meet their own needs when they are not free even to determine their needs, a process that requires a free market, not one that is engineered for a "sustainability" that depends on market needs which the government cannot predict?
