Hilzoy finds that the Men Of The Mind are a puzzling lot…

The unemployment numbers are dreadful. But for once, there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon: conservatives are going Galt.

"While they take to the streets politically, untold numbers of America’s wealth producers are going on strike financially. Dr. Helen Smith, a Tennessee forensic psychologist and political blogger, dubbed the phenomenon "Going Galt" last fall. It’s a reference to the famed Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged," in which protagonist John Galt leads the entrepreneurial class to cease productive activities in order to starve the government of revenue. (…)

The perpetual Borrow-Spend-Panic-Repeat machine in Washington depends on the capitulation of the wealth producers. There’s only one monkey wrench that can stop the redistributionist thieves’ engine. It’s engraved with the word: Enough."

As Matt Yglesias says:

"Just think what kind of nightmare scenario we might be inflicted with if the titans of finance who’ve made up such a large proportion of high earners in recent years were to pull back on their efforts! I shudder."

Unfortunately, we don’t know how many of America’s wealth producers are going to go on strike, since their number is "untold".

There’s a wee problem here that I’m sure has been spotted by the gasbags on the right. Vis:

But every one of them will free up work for someone else.  And thanks to eight years of Bush’s economic policies, we are not short of unemployed people to take up the slack.

I am puzzled by one thing, however: the fact that none of the people who advocate "going Galt" seem to have actually done it.

I appreciate your puzzlement Hilzoy.  Keep looking at the sentence you wrote about how every one of them that goes Galt frees up a job for someone else and you get the picture.  They know damn well that quitting isn’t going to prove anything, other then how worthless they actually were in the grand economic scheme of things.  Let’s face it, these are the folks who have been advocating, for decades now, the kinds of deregulation blue sky that got us into this mess in the first place.  Wealth producers?  More like wealth leaches. 

I’m not clear whether the point of "going Galt" is to stop doing creative or productive work, as Rand’s novel would suggest, or trying to lower one’s income, as many of the people quoted in stories about "going Galt" claim.

To stop doing productive work, you’d have had to have been doing productive work to begin with.

But as best I can tell, the people advocating this are doing neither. Consider:

Rep. John Campbell has neither resigned from Congress nor given back any part of his salary.

Michelle Malkin is still blogging, and still seems to be on the PJMedia payroll.

Dr. Helen, who is "still mulling over ways that she can "go Galt,"" has not taken any of the obvious steps: stopping blogging, giving up her career, severing her connection to PJTV, or even not taking BlogAds. Neither has her husband.

Cassy at Wizbang, who says it’s "time to go Galt", doesn’t seem to have stopped blogging either, and Wizbang is still running ads.

It’s almost enough to make me think they’re just posturing.

Like…when they’re going on about homosexuality and sexual morality?  Personal accountability?  Let’s face it, if it weren’t for the right wing billionaire dole most of these deep thinkers wouldn’t have an income, let alone a platform.  They’re gasbags.  And I’ll endure lectures on the evils of government spending and taxation from a lot of people, but not a congressman.  Especially not a republican congressman.

Let’s take a closer look at this ersatz grass roots revolt against President Obama’s economic policies…shall we?

Right-Wing ‘Tea Party’ Movement Was Planned Months Ago by GOP Billionaires

Populist revolt against the U.S. government is all the rage in the Republican Party, these days. As they tell the story, the public is so outraged by the recovery and reinvestment efforts of the Obama administration that Americans everywhere are turning out to overthrow the tyrannical king of the federal government by re-enacting the Boston Tea Party.

Funny thing, though: it turns out this whole "populist" movement was a planned PR stunt funded by big-money right-wing backers of the GOP who specialize in faking grassroots movements to drum up opposition to Barack Obama.

Everything about this so called "Tea Party" movement was pre-planned–from the supposedly "spontaneous rant" of CNBC stock market reporter, Rick Santelli, to the presumed ground-level organizing of protests all over the country. Fake, fake, fake–like a product launch staged covertly to look like a spontaneous trend.

Playboy bloggers Mark Ames and Yasha Levine pulled together all the pieces of this puzzle in an incredible expose (Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine):

What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.

Go read the whole thing.  It’s the right-wing billionaire club we’ve all come to know and love, screwing the political process so they can keep screwing the middle-class.  If you thought the fight was over when Obama won, you are sadly mistaken.

If we could just get rid of these drooling morons we might have a rational discussion in this country about the economy and how to clean up the mess the billionaire teat sucking jackasses have brought down on all of us.  Going Galt would be a blessing for this country…the best thing they’ve ever done for it.  So, fat chance of that happening.