Absolutely. This is exactly the reason why its useless today to support an objectivist candidate for president. They CANT be elected.

I know what you mean. Its pretty disgusting listening to all this statist stuff on the news, all the negativity, the guilt trips over "helping the poor", etc. Not to mention the bums asking for money.

If I actually get accosted by bums asking for money, by the way, I always ask them "Let me get this straight- I should go to work to make money so I can give it to you so that YOU dont have to work. Where did you get THAT idea?"

They walk away.

Very inspiring actually. I think "going galt" is typically done in small steps, mostly because to just go cold turkey isnt practical for most people. It takes much planning to maintain a decent lifestyle outside of the mainstream system.

I used to be a medical device manufacturer, but when the FDA came in and regulated it to death, I sold my business and got OUT of medical devices. Since then I am working in other businesses with little or no regulations. When the government regulates those, I will move on to something else. By then, I hope to amass enough money to be able to just move somewhere where statism hasnt reached the levels in the USA.

You speak for many retirees, and to an extent for myself. I'm not entirely out. While I'm all paid up with home, car, etc. I still live in a community. True, it is a suburban village, but still, there are the taxes, the multitude of laws and regulations, but I'm no longer on boards, or president of anything, or even arguing in the supermarket. If it wasn't for the Gulch and my friends and family, chances are I would become a 4 bedroom, 2 car garage troglodyte.

You can only influence those who do use reason, one person at a time. If no one could use sound reason the country would have collapsed into a new Dark Age long ago. Americans don't give up. It would be much, much worse once the entrenched ideas accepted have become even worse and so emotionally ingrained that you literally can't touch it -- the way it was and is in primitive societies and entrenched totalitarian and socialist societies, and in the first Dark Ages. It can get a lot worse.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't recognize what is happening and be disgusted by it, and it doesn't mean you have a duty to sacrifice yourself to it or spend your whole life fighting it rather than pursuing such personal goals as you can. You have to choose for yourself what values you pursue.

Whatever any of us does, if only to try to prevent an even worse collapse within our own life span or perhaps another generation of this one's children, it has to be philosophical, but it can't be entirely theoretical. Philosophy can only be implemented by real people taking action in the real world, including influencing government policy to be, if nothing else, less worse.

"Is there enough of the American sense of life left in people—under the constant pressure of the cultural-political efforts to obliterate it? It is impossible to tell. But those of us who hold it, must fight for it. We have no alternative: we cannot surrender this country to a zero—to men whose battle cry is mindlessness.

"We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something—and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being.

"These are philosophical issues. The philosophy we need is a conceptual equivalent of America's sense of life. To propagate it, would require the hardest intellectual battle. But isn't that a magnificent goal to fight for?" -- Ayn Rand, conclusion of "Don't Let it Go", 1971.

Ditto...unfortunately...unable to make that move.

I applaud the attempts to enlighten society, but I lack the energy to maintain the fight. Mainly because I see it as a losing proposition. Asking someone to use sound reason is like asking them to use Sanskrit.

A lot of us are disgusted. Productive people have always silently quit, cut back on their efforts, or changed jobs or careers because the effort was no longer worth it -- or more actively moved to another region or country (usually to this one) to avoid repression. As a cultural phenomenon in this country it is becoming more common. Perhaps everyone on this forum has done some part of it to some extent at a personal level, though not intended as a "strike". Ayn Rand described it in "Is Atlas Shrugging" over 50 years ago in 1964, published in her anthology Capitalism the Unknown Ideal.

But Ayn Rand was an intellectual who advocated the spread of betters ideas, particularly philosophical ideas, as the fundamental means to influence the course of the country. That is what much of the discussion here has been about because there have been misconceptions about the meaning of the plot in Atlas Shrugged. She opposed the notions of attempting reform by dropping out of society entirely, trying to emulate the fictional Galt's Gulch of Atlas Shrugged, going on "strike", trying to start new countries, etc., let alone calling for a revolution to bring down the country. None of that would make any improvement without the spread of proper ideas of rational egoism and individualism.