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Who is John Galt?

A Naturalist's Letter to a Critic


Who is John Galt?

"Okay," someone wrote, "I already know who John Galt is. I read the book 'Atlas
Shrugged' and want to know if anyone agrees with Galt's god-awful long speech
about how people's intellectual properties should only belong to the
intellectuals..."

Dear Critic: Galt spoke these words in that speech:

"We're on strike against your creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. If
you want to know how I made [the strikers] quit, I told them exactly what I'm
telling you tonight. I taught them the morality of Reason -- that it was right to
pursue one's own happiness as one's principal goal in life. I don't consider the
pleasure of others my goal in life, nor do I consider my pleasure the goal of
anyone else's life.

"I am a trader. I earn what I get in trade for what I produce. I ask for nothing
more or nothing less than what I earn. That is justice. I don't force anyone to
trade with me; I only trade for mutual benefit. Force is the great evil that has
no place in a rational world. One may never force another human to act against
his/her judgment. If you deny a man's right to Reason, you must also deny your
right to your own judgment. Yet you have allowed your world to be run by means of
force, by men who claim that fear and joy are equal incentives, but that fear and
force are more practical. " http://www.working-minds.com/galtmini.htm

These are the tenets of a man who recognized the natural, unalienable rights of
every individual human to own what is his or hers, not just of "intellectuals."
Through out the book Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon are driving through the
countryside looking at the dilapidated houses and the starving people, and
wondering how America and the entire world could have been brought to this
situation by their leaders, whom the people trusted. When they are not driving,
they see in their minds the poor, the starving, the destitute of soul. In a world
governed by the recognition of naturalistic philosphy, such as the Unites States
once was, such poor, starving, and destitute people were being lifted out of the
mud, not put back into it.

It is against the elite leaders, who believe they know what's best for the people,
that Galt deplores. Under author Ayn Rand's system of laissez faire capitalism,
every man and woman would be enabled of their birthright, as opposed to "being
allowed by government," to do whatever--repeat whatever--he/she wanted to do with
their lives, their minds, their property, so long as they did not use the
initiation of force to overwhelm the same birth-given rights of another person.
"Unalienable" does not mean the government cannot, with enough power and coercion,
prevent you from using your rights; it can, illegally and with tyranny.
"Unalienable" means birth-given.

Equality comes from the freedom from that force and coercion of government, but
government ideas come from the elite who gain power and twist the Constitution to
mean what they want it to mean. Did you ever stop to wonder why our government has
such power over us, when the Founders clearly meant to limit such power? The elite
at one time were our saviors; now they are the ones who would betray us for a
handful of gold, or for that power to decide "the common good."
There is a difference between "the common good," which on its face sounds like
equality, and "the common defence and general Welfare" used in the Constitution as
the purposes of that document. The "common good" is a concept to either run from,
or better yet, to destroy, because there is no "common good" but what is good for
each individual as individuals. The "general Welfare" means the protection of the
rights of individuals, not the collection of power to be used over individuals to
provide for some undefined "higher value" than the rights of single human being to
exist in the state that nature provided for him, the state of being a rational
animal so that he would know how to provide for his own good.

In the Fourteenth Amendment was created the new concept of "citizens of the United
States," a class of citizen which until then did not exist. That class of citizen
is directly under the control of the Federal Government, which was the intended
purpose of that clause of the Amendment, but not for the purposes of a more
powerful government in general. The newly-minted power of the Federal Government
that came with control of this new class of citizen was intended by the Radical
Republicans to be used to immediately stop the abuses of the "Freedmen" that were
not stopped by the Thirteenth Amendment. But since then, it has been used for
every thing under the sun, by the newly-minted class of elites created by that
clause. Anyone who dares use that clause for anything but the protection of
individuals is an elitist who would take your birth-given rights because they
don't see individuals; they see "classes." The Freedmen were seen as a class of
men, not as individuals who merely fit the profile of those whose protection the
Fourteenth was intended to protect.

That is what Rand's book is about--the loss of reason and sanity to be found in
the tyrannical control of classes of people. It is universally recognized in our
nation that laws may not be written to target any individual, nor to be used
against only one individual; but it is as equally recognized that laws may be
targeted against classes of citizens. No, today's America is hardly a "tyranny" in
the classical sense. But then, today's political situation would be a very
intolerable "classical" tyranny to the Founders and they would decry the creation
of such a political entity as a "citizen of the United States," controlled by the
Federal Government. Their intended plan for freedom was exactly the opposite, that
the "control" was in the consent of those being controlled, and that could only
come from the rights of the States to protect its citizens from the tyranny of a
Federal Government out of control with power.

"Your acceptance of the code of selflessness," Galt spoke, referring to this


fictional time in the world when the morality of absolute altrusim, "has made you
fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that
dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the
dollar he's keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know
when to give and when to grab."

Such altruism comes from the propaganda of a thing the elites call the "common
good." What they define as "good" is less individual power over one's own life, so
that the masses have the power over individuals. This is nothing less than the
mentality of gangs.

But Galt is also speaking to the altruist in all of us right now, because the
world in "Atlas Shrugged" is Rand's vision of the logical-extremist ends of the
domestic and international policies our government has been following for 60
decades or more. Both of our current Presidential candidates have admitted that
the $700,000,000,000 a year we pay for foreign oil and foreign aid is often spent
in nations that hate us and who would use that capital to do us harm. That is the
altruism of a nation only wishes in good faith to help spread the good fortune of
America's wealth. Both candidates agree this altruism must stop. But only one of
them says the intellectual rights of oil producers in this country should be given
back, and then only to alleviate a problem for consumers (the common good), not
because it is the right thing to do for the producers.

Galt is also giving confirmation to the rational humans who understand the purpose
of the strikers in the novel, and to the common man both in the novel and in the
reality of today who understands why the leaders of industry have disappeared,
gone on strike, to leave the economy to distintigrate further and faster, like a
train out of control.

The common man who understands the purpose of the strikers cheers for them, he
does not condemn them. He wishes he could go on strike and join them. Those common
people understand, and part of the purpose of Galt's speech is to vindicate them.
In parts of the speech he speaks directly to them, telling them they are not
morally wrong, that they are right, and that when the elites get their heads out
of their as*es, the leaders of industry will return.

You need to read the book, not just take the speech out of context without seeing
the miserable way in which the common people are living, and the compassion the
book's heros have for those people. The character of Eddie Willers was
purposefully meant to represent them--you, me us, and anyone who is not a Bill
Gates, Suze Orman, Warren Buffet, Martha Stewart, or a T. Boone Pickens, the very
people who would go on strike in a real "Atlas Shrugged" world--with dignity and
grace.

Let's hope you get some common sense of your own and wake up to the freedoms Rand
was trying to instill in you. She was Jefferson, she was Thomas Paine, she was
Madison, she was the Federalist Papers, she was the Constitution, as they were
intended to be remembered and used.

"Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be


repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on
private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals,
only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power,
but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.

"A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to


make a society free and to keep it free—a system that does not depend on the
motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system
that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

"The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And
although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the
growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution
as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government." from “The
Nature of Government,” in "The Virtue of Selfishness"; Rand.
"Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document
—the Constitution—which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to
act on whim. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all the other kinds of
governments—unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions—demonstrates
the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was
built.

"The clause giving Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce is one of
the major errors in the Constitution. That clause, more than any other, was the
crack in the Constitution’s foundation, the entering wedge of statism, which
permitted the gradual establishment of the welfare state. But I would venture to
say that the framers of the Constitution could not have conceived of what that
clause has now become. If, in writing it, one of their goals was to facilitate the
flow of trade and prevent the establishment of trade barriers among the states,
that clause has reached the opposite destination." from“Censorship: Local and
Express,” in "Philosophy: Who Needs It"; Rand

"This country," Galt said, "wasn't built by men who sought handouts. In its
brilliant youth, this country showed the rest of the world what greatness was
possible to Man and what happiness is possible on Earth."

Do you think it was the "intellectuals" who put their backs and brawn into
building railroads, bridges, dams, and skyscrapers? Do you think it was
"intellectuals" who were the first to be told they were valuable enough to earn $5
a day in Henry Ford's car factories? Ford was the "intellectual" in that
situation, and he knew that their worth to him was to reward them by making them
the best-paid employees on the planet in their day.

It was to those types of people that Galt was speaking when he said, "[T]hose of
you who retain some remnant of dignity and the will to live your lives for
yourselves" will quit living "with undeserved, irrational guilt," guilt born of
accusations of "selfishness" that we use more resources per capita than other
nations; in effect, what has come to be called "conspicuous consumption." If
Americans quit consuming as much as they did, the rest of the world would go
broke. As soon as other nations' peoples can afford to consume as much as we do,
they will do so.

So long as what we consume is paid for, the people of the nations we buy the raw
material or the finished goods from make out like bandits--as well they should.
But in the world of "Atlas Shrugged," it is those other nations that fall first--
because America has come to believe in its own guilt, and in an attempt to attone
in the only way such guilt allows atonement, lets down the rest of the world. One
by one, the destitute nations who accepted altruism much quicker and easier than
America are taken over by the same tyrannical despots who have come to control the
United States.

In a comparison of the Ten Planks of Marx's "Communist Manifesto" along with the
American adopted counterpart of each of the planks, Marx stated in the "Manifesto"
that these planks will test whether a country has become commmunist or not.
Plank #1 was: Abolition of private property and the application of all rent to
public purpose. In the U.S. this is becoming implemented through the 14th
Amendment, and various zoning, school & property taxes, as well as the Bureau of
Land Management. (For a comparrison of all 10 Planks against America's
implementation of them, see http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/10planks.htm . Some
of them are arguable; some of them could contain many more breaches by the
Government than are listed.)

Galt knew that we commoners needed the intellectuals, and it was intellectuals he
talked into striking with him. How did he get these self-made, wealthy business
and industry leaders walk away from their businesses to leave them to rot or to go
to the "looters"?

He told them they did not deserve the way their government treated them. He told
them that if they treated their own workers that way, the workers would strike
against him. He told them they were the only thing, the only people, propping up
the tyrrany of the government that made slaves of them by controlling their
industries for their own purposes.

Today we have laws governing virtually every industry from automobiles to drugs to
bread manufacture. At one time there was a law that prevented anything that
resembed today's nutritious whole grain breads from being called "bread." Bread
was defined by its ingredients and were bland, bleached, or robbed of all
nutrition. There was a law that prevented 2% milk from being called "milk." The
inventor of 2% is still alive (as far as I know), so that law was not so long ago.
Neither was law against calling "nutritous baked wheat loaves" by name of "bread."

The right to control such things as new foods, new accessories on cars, new
methods of fueling those cars, and especially drugs because they are so large in
our culture and our news the right to much longer property rights on drugs that
cost hundred of millions of dollars to invent, test and market--the rights of
control are "intellectual" property rights, and they properly belong to those who
invent them. The rights to control them do not belong to the people except under
tightly defined parameters, such as the length of time a patent shall be held
before its expiration.

But such things have been shortened for "the common good," to make generics
available. "Generics" are the elites' code word for stolen property, because they
had to shorten the patent rights in order to get "generics." Now is it any wonder
that drug companies must charge exhoribant prices to get a return that will allow
them to continue to operate?

So yes, Dear Critic, intellectual property rights do belong to the intellectuals,


not to the "people." Patent rights on drugs are no different than those on toys.
After a certain period of time, should every toy manufacturer have the "right" to
produce their own Barbie Doll, or their own Madden Football, or their own
competing Chicago Bears team or their own competing IPods? Those are products that
belong to the intellectual who created them when "intellectual" is defined as a
branded product created by a human mind.

It is one thing to start a competing football team; it is a completely different


thing to steal a trademarked name, which is a branded product created by human
minds, and give the right to manufacture it to every Dick and Mary who has enough
money to do so. If Dick and Mary cannot create their own Prozac, Dick and Mary
have no business, legal, moral, or otherwise to use the intellectual possessions
of other individuals, any more than you or I should have the right to start a team
and call them the Detroit Tigers.

Intellectual property is the property of an intellect; intellect belongs to


individuals, not mobs, gangs, or elites who represent the common good. Naturalism
is about the place of individuals in the society of men, in the conditions created
by living on earth, and those conditions create not only birth-given rights to
freedom from physical force and coercion, but intellectual birth-given rights,
without which no mind would be free to conceive of new ideas, and without which
all intellectuals should go on strike.

Please send all comments to mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com The Free Assemblage of


Metaphysical Naturalists is the sm (servicemark) of the Academy of Metaphysical
Naturalism tm, which is the educational arm of the Assemblage.

This publication © 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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