It's almost time to "Go Galt"

For those who regularly read the Wall Street Journal, you know that the regular columnist Peggy Noonan is often incisive and always diplomatic. (She was a speech writer for Ronald Reagan.) But in today's column at the WSJ, Ms. Noonan actually called politicians stupid, and she referred to a businessman who said he's so fed up with government's confiscatory taxation that he's about ready to just quit, and he knows other businessmen who already have. I wrote the following letter to the editor at the WSJ on Ms. Noonan's column.

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When the ever-polite and diplomatic Peggy Noonan calls the leaders of America stupid, we have crossed a threshold.

Ms. Noonan is right, of course – though she is, ironically, being polite again. These so-called leaders are, instead, willfully and consciously ignorant of what is right and, more important, what individual rights are.

They have high-education degrees but chose to buy into the power-lust “progressivism” and coercive altruism of Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and every other leader in American politics, to some degree, in the 20^th and 21^st century. They turned their noses up at Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Locke, Aristotle, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. They think, like all skeptics of human nature such as Thomas Hobbes, that citizens and their businesses must be strictly controlled, that those who earn lots of money on merit and education must be sacrificed to those who don’t, that a government made up of humans is somehow more moral than those it monitors and suppresses.

And the result is everything Ms. Noonan alluded to: confiscatory taxation, redistribution, oppressive regulation and purposely vague legislation that puts businesses and people at the mercy of corrupt lawyers and bureaucrats. It gets to a point, as Ms. Noonan said of her businessman, where we hard workers and owners of businesses and wealth seekers do, indeed, want to quit – or “Go Galt,” in reference to the hero in Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which the great thinkers and businessmen chose to “stop the motor of the world” because they tired of rapacious government.

If the citizens and leaders of this once-great country do not inform themselves soon on what is right, that day will come. And none too soon for this boy from Texas.