Who is John Galt?

I will try to be concise in this post, but it will probably be a long, bloviating post that will bore 95% of the people who read it. I have been a terrible blogger recently and I will chalk it up to being busy with work and mostly to being too fed up with the world to put any thoughts to paper (or should I say keystrokes).

Our daughter was born nearly ten months ago and although it is hard to fathom, she is already over $36,000 in debt. This is not due to her closets full of clothes, but the actions of our elected leaders in running up large deficits. I am typically ok with national debt, but our situation is quickly getting out of hand. The current budget will put Little Miss T in debt approximately $60,000 (her share of the national debt) by the time she is ten years old. The fact that our lawmakers such as Dodd, Waters and Frank can browbeat leaders of free enterprise in congressional hearings while leveraging my and your balance sheet is the worst hypocrisy imaginable. I wish that we had an elected official who would stand up for what's right the way that Daniel Hannan an elected official in England recently did.

He may be John Galt. (I wish we had leaders who could speak this eloquently, and without even using a teleprompter.) My favorite line which is very applicable to our situation in the States is, "You have run out of our money."

My second nominee for a modern John Galt is Jake DeSantis, a former AIG employee. Jake wrote and excoriating resignation letter to his boss explaining exactly why he was leaving and it was published in the NY Times. The "populist" rhetoric and bile that has been thrown on Wall Street lately is sickening and I think it's high time we head to our windows, open it and yell, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore". It is unimaginable that our public leaders expressed an interest in publicizing employees names who received bonuses so that they could be openly scorned and possibly assaulted. Even more disgusting was the vote to punitively use the tax code to punish hard working citizens with a tax of 90%. Why not tax people who's homes were foreclosed with a 90% tax, or any real estate agents, mortgage brokers, residential lenders, house flippers or people who have defaulted on credit card or any other debt; they are just as guilty and more so than the current employees of investment banks and AIG for our current economic difficulties. I think it was embarrassing to ask these employees to give back their hard-earned bonuses and it was un-American for the employees to comply and give them back. What this country needs is more greed, ownership and capitalism rather than fear, blame and social planning. We are walking down a dangerous path that many have trod before us and I fear that the time may come for the producers of this country to shrug.