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I am John Galt

Posted by on October 3, 2010

The looters and moochers are gathering again, my friends.  We are now under the heel of an anarchist totalitarian voodoo doctor bent on destroying America.  For 50 years, they have plotted revenge.  Their weapon: a small modification to the tax code!

See, right now you’re nodding your head.  This is so clear to you, because you have common sense.  Those radical elitist intellectuals think you’re just going to stand aside while they fill their new Dachaus and Buchenwalds with those who won’t kowtow to their caudillo.  They think you won’t protest when people who won’t worship their Golden Calf are killed by death squads and ground up into some kind of burger to be fed to schoolchildren being indoctrinated in promiscuity, godlessness, and the mongrelization of the races in their state-run summer camps.  I’m just kidding about that last part, folks.  Or am I?  Just throwing that out there. 

Perhaps my good friends in the Demosocialist Politburo think they have everything their way now.  I assure you, nothing could be farther from the truth.  As a hero of capitalism, I can no longer continue to stand by while we, the only productive members of society, are demonized as fat cats by pickaninny atheist Czars in ivory towers.

60% of Americans pay no taxes at all.  These lucky duckies will never know the pain of having one’s top marginal tax rate raised from 35% to 39.5%.  People shouldn’t get to vote at all unless then have some skin in the game.  The more you have to lose, the more votes you get.  That’s democracy.

Progressive taxation is immoral and unconstitutional.  It says so right there in the 14th Amendment!  In fact, the rich ought to be taxed at a lower rate than the poor, because the rich contribute more to society.  The proof of that is they make more money.

By raising my taxes, you’ll only be hurting yourselves.  Poor people shouldn’t trust their own opinions about what will hurt or help them—instead, they should listen to me, because I am much smarter than them.  If they succeed in raising my taxes, the first thing I’ll cut from my budget will be Tiny Tim’s Christmas food allowance.  And believe me, you do not want Tiny Tim out there again, trying to hustle up a few dollars playing his ukulele.  The last time that happened, it eventually led to the worst event in recorded history prior to the 2008 U.S. presidential election (I refer, of course, to the 1976 U.S. presidential election).  So remember: you can’t raises taxes on the wealthy, or we’ll stop putting quarters in your Styrofoam cups as we walk to our Lincoln Town Cars.

Besides, I’m not rich!  I live paycheck to paycheck.  All my money each month goes toward necessities: boarding school tuition for my three families, plus property taxes on my three (North American) homes, my children’s weekly allowances of $5,000 (I keep their allowances so small because I don’t want them to grow up with a sense of entitlement—I want them to achieve something with only the sweat of their brows, like former unnominated Republican presidential candidate and flat tax enthusiast Steve Forbes), upkeep on my yacht, my 747, my submarine, and my spaceship for clandestine trips to the secret base on the dark side for the Moon where Persons of Quality will live during the upcoming global catastrophe, my polo ponies, my mistress’s penthouse, my mistress’s cat and her cat’s therapist, my longevity treatments where I am injected with the blood of virgins, and not to mention payments to various Senators, regulators, the SEC, the EPA, INS, and especially my landscapers—the Lawn Wranglers—who do such a terrific job.  You look at that budget and tell me where to trim the fat.  There’s just no way!

In fact, I’d like to formally invite a certain Nazi Communist president to dinner at my humble abode sometime, so he can see how an average Joe Six-Pack (me) is scraping by under his regime.  But be sure to schedule it in advance, or the people at my control tower won’t let you land Air Force One on either of my runways.

Instead of castigating me, you should all be thanking me.  If I wasn’t around to pay $5 million for a Jake and Dinos Chapman installation of mutated department store mannequins having sex, who would?  You want to force poor Tracey Emin to go back to sleeping in that filthy, disheveled bed instead of exhibiting it at the Tate Modern?  What kind of heartless monster are you?

Believe me, you’re lucky you don’t have to spend time being measured for handmade Italian suits or negotiating with $1,000-per-hour prostitutes to get them to do one particular thing that some people might think was weird or then having said prostitutes killed when they try to blackmail you.  You think I enjoy eating Wagyu steak and being massaged by lithe Asian experts in shiatsu?  No, I do those things to keep my mind and body in peak condition.  (And yet, through it all, I still remain a man of the people.)  And you’re lucky to have avoided the pressure of winning all the time.  Every time I win (which is all the time, at everything as I do), it just creates more pressure to win the next time.

I started out with nothing.  I was compelled to greatness by my own self-created genius, owing nothing to genetics, my environment, connections, or luck.  If God restarted the universe from Day One, the people who are on top in the year 2010 would inevitably come out on top again, and even if Earth II turned out like Planet of the Apes, it would just mean there’d be a chimp version of me at the top of the pyramid.

It is no selfishness or self-aggrandizement that drives me, my friends.  Originally I wanted nothing more from life than to sit on the beach, strumming my six-string in front of a driftwood fire.  Nowadays I own a private island in the Caribbean and John Lennon’s acoustic Gibson, but I never have time to enjoy them.  You see how I suffer?  And I do it all for the benefit of America.  If it weren’t for people like me, you would never have been blessed with such pinnacles of civilization as collateralized debt obligations or The Apprentice.

If you change the tax code, you destroy our incentive to innovate.  If a hypothetical socialist fascist Afro-American presidential administration in the early 1980’s had forced Bill Gates to pay a top marginal rate of 39.5% instead of 35%, he would have refused to invent the Windows operating system, and I for one would have saluted him for it.  He wouldn’t have deigned to found Microsoft for anything less than 50 billion dollars.  That would make him a slave to a maniacal al-Qaeda commissar.  If J.K. Rowling had thought she might get paid only, say, 750 million dollars to write Harry Potter, and not 1,000 million, she would have quite rightly refused.  And nobody else would have created an operating system or a series of books just as good.

We must go on strike, my fellow creators of wealth.  As of this moment, I will write no more forever, or until the current Brownshirt Mau Mau tyrant is out of office.  I will simply hoard my great ideas, never sharing them with the masses.  As long as we, the sole benefactors of America, are on strike, no one else will come up with any ideas, because all people capable of coming up with ideas are already accounted for among the wealthy.

Without us, America will grind to a halt, and eventually they’ll come begging us to restart the civilization that we graciously invented and operated for all those ingrates.  Maybe we will consent, but no more Mr. Nice Guy.

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