My Heart Knows What the Wild Goose Knows

Insofar as I wish to see civilization destroyed and the great cities of the world covered in vines, I guess you could call me a fan of smaller government, but on the other hand, conservative invocations of Martin Niemoller In Re: the matter of the progressive income tax is pretty fucking . . . fucked. "First they came for the super-rich, and I did nothing . . ." As a Homosexual-American, let me assure you that not all 8 hot cut inches on Manhunt manifest in those precise proportions in real life. Likewise the belligerents in the class war now crawling out of the wirework to inform Glenn Reynolds of the impending danger to their two-fiddy a year on top of a million in payroll are not to be fully trusted. I mean, can you give it to me in cash? My concern, and I'll have to check with my accountant on this, is that it might bump me up into a higher . . .

Anyway, Reynold's army of John Galts (pray: come, let us snicker together), a gang of pencil-neck Sharper-Image shoppers with dreams of mountain redoubts and rough sex with heiresses, petulantly proclaim that they will . . . well, they do not seem to be proclaiming that they will stop the engine of the world. Rather, they will consider slowing it marginally, like union slugs caging an extra five minutes on every smoke break in order to stick it to Management. The irony. Oh.

In an era when Alan Greenspan goes apostate on the hoary Randian doxologies, invoking her, uh, economics is a move akin to threatening that you will stop the flow of the Spice. Fine and well, but a fiction. The idea that the willpower of Chief Exec alone, his lonely, Olympian struggle to master the means of production, impelled industry along was already outmoded by the time she transferred all those scratchings on the prison wall of her mind to the page. Rand's heroes and heroines are never seen conducting real business because Rand had no idea how a business works. The business of business is mundane, not heroic. Steel doesn't roll by pronouncement.

My favorite correspondent over at Reynolds' is the doctor who swears he will stop curing the ill if Obama is elected. He and his family will go out into the woods and live like wild dogs, foraging for food and hunting in packs, rather than allow that Socialist Obama to, uh, lower their standard of living. I mean, I laughed at liberal avowals to move to Canada back in aught-four, but this is just ridiculous.

Via Roy Edroso