and the Villianous Parasites Destroying it ...
WHO IS JOHN GALT?
It has been both a cry in the dark and a call to arms for generations of readers of Ayn Rand's great novels - which brilliantly portray a world like ours, a world of both great achievement and great crisis. Real-life titans of our time answer the question : Who is John Galt? ...
Steve Jobs : like the fictatious Howard Roarke is
THE INDIVIDUALIST, who reinvented computers, movies, music and telephones - just because it was cool
Paul Krugman : THE MAD COLLECTIVIST akin to Rand's Ellsworth Toohey - corrupted economics and cheapened public discourse for the sake of partisan politics preaching socialism from America's newspapers of record.
John Allison : THE LEADER and the closest to the heroic John Galt - He built on of America's strongest banks - by having 30,000 employees read Atlas Shrugged and then walked away.
Angelo Mozilo : THE PARASITE - in the sense of James Taggart - the predatory lender who used taxpayer money to inflate the subprime housing bubble, corrupting government and nearly destroying the US economy.
Bill Gates : as Henry Reardon - THE PERSECUTED TITAN - the businessman who created revolutionary technologies and became the richest man in the world - was criminalized for his success to the point that his government almost destroyed him
Barney Franks : THE CENTRAL PLANNER - a Wesley Mouch - the populist politician who meddled in the economy and turned fannie mae in a weapon of mass economic destruction
T.J. Rodgers : THE CAPITALIST CHAMPION - Francisco d"Anconia - the modern Rennaissance Man - the bad-boy high-tech CEO - who speaks out against corporate welfare and political correctness - the agent provocacteur for capitalism.
Alan Greenspan : THE SELLOUT - as Robert Sadler - Ayn Rand's lifelong friend who became an economic czar - the ultimate sellout or a double-agent for libertarienism?
Milton Friedman : THE ECONOMIST OF LIBERTY - as Hugh Acston - the academic who showed the world the connection between capitalism and freedom - he made economics into a science - and showed that capitalism and freedom are inseparable
The world portrayed in Rand's books was the world of the industrial era - when leading-edge technologies were railroads and steel mills. Today's Randian heroes run software companies, not railroads. They manufacture semiconducters, not steel. But the principles of success are the same. The philosophy is the same, and Rand laid it all out more than 50 years ago.
Rand's villians are alive and well too. They are portrayed as proof that collectivism, self-abnegation, envy, power-lust and the corrupt alliance of business and government are all strategies for personal ruin that spill over into horrific consequences for the world. The economic paradoxysm that rocked the world late in the first decade of the 2000s was caused specifically by individuals operating perfectly in the mode of Rand's parasitic villians.
Our real world and Rand's fictatious world are both the best of times and the worst of times. Our heroes have created personal wealth never before seen in history by creating technological marvels that were thought just a few years ago, to be impossibilities found only in science fiction. Our villians very nearly succeeded in bringing the world economy to it's knees.
Such is the power of one's personal philosophy.
Such is the power of individual choice.
WHO IS JOHN GALT? ... we can each choose to be ...
from: I AM JOHN GALT - Donald Luskin and Andrew Grete (highly recommended)
