Who Has to Shrug?
Posted by TheRealBill 8 years, 7 months ago to Economics
In the world of Atlas Shrugged, the key industries were essentially run by their respective heroes. This made it easy, of course, for Galt to know who to watch and who to hep "shrug".
As I mentioned in a recent comment, I'm sure we know enough about the looters to predict and enable them to collapse the failing system. But do we know enough about who would need to shrug? Are we "beyond" the point where a handful, or even a thousand, people are integral enough that if they shrugged it would trigger/advance the collapse?
So I'm wondering: who are some key people that might be "needed" to shrug - not from the pain too view of what the Gulch would need, but to trigger/advance the collapse of the failed system by their absence.
As I mentioned in a recent comment, I'm sure we know enough about the looters to predict and enable them to collapse the failing system. But do we know enough about who would need to shrug? Are we "beyond" the point where a handful, or even a thousand, people are integral enough that if they shrugged it would trigger/advance the collapse?
So I'm wondering: who are some key people that might be "needed" to shrug - not from the pain too view of what the Gulch would need, but to trigger/advance the collapse of the failed system by their absence.
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I think the bigger issue is when/if the educated, hard-working middle-class will shrug. It's happening already, I think.
Unless...
... invention is so tightly regulated and new companies are so expensive to start up that innovation is effectively throttled and only approved inventions make it into the marketplace. That is happening with all the red tape around new businesses: everything from licenses and permits and taxes and employment rules to Obamacare. I don't see American Producers actively shrugging. Not happening. What will happen is that government burden will be the deal-killer.
Come to the High Frontier.
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...
Make no mistake I think what musk is doing is fabulous and all, but it is still small potatoes. That and at least for his car he made available for free use the patents involved. He has already handed over the key "secrets" to the Tesla.
Cuban isn't really a key economic player either. Sure he owns some stuff and is a "shark" but lacks significant clout in the national scale.
I think you are on the right track with energy companies, but here we aren't talking about their actual control and influence but their market cap. Combine that with them already being in bed with the moochers and not being led by a single visionary and I don't see the potential for a shrug making any impact there.
In AS copper production was essentially owned by one man. Steel was effectively owned by one man. Oil production was essentially owned by one man. Rail transport was effectively owned by one woman. Gates doesn't own Microsoft. He doesn't even run it anymore. Musk owns SpaceX but the vast majority would never know if left - if they even knew it exists at all. If Tesla Motors died (which it nearly did) it would be chalked up to another failed car company startup.
In AS those who shrugged and dismantled what they left behind were dismantling their own property. You couldn't say the same for a CEO of a power company or software company today.
If anything I'd say AS was indeed taken to heart and showed the "weakness" of any takeover was, as it always has been, in the fundamental right to property and individual ownership.
Thus I wonder if the "shrug" is even possible from that aspect. It seems to me a more realistic possibility might be to simply start fresh somewhere else, leaving the new old world behind much as America left Europe behind.
T. J. Rodgers, Mark Cuban ...
Largest US Energy Producers
http://www.statista.com/statistics/23...
Largest US software firms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
But my intuition is that the leaders in those businesses read Atlas Shrugged long ago. They "got" it, but chose to make it part of their personal philosophies, rather than a dogma to be obeyed.
The other side of the gold coin is the dream of Gulchers that the whole rotten system come crashing down so that they can shoot their way to a gold-based economy. In in her book, Enemies of the Future, Reason editor Virginia Postrel included them in with leftists and religionists who want the same thing.