Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s peerless story of the man who stopped the world.

The hero, a brilliant inventor called John Galt, decides to stand up against galloping collectivism and ‘go on strike’, removing his mind and personal energy from the economy. He persuades other key industrialists to follow him. They just vanish from public view, often taking lowly jobs but doing them well.

The US economy starts to grind to a halt as the contradictions caused by collectivist appropriation of private talent accumulate, and the willingness of the best minds in the country to be exploited and cheated dwindles.

Helen Smith prompts an exchange on whether the time is coming when people have so lost faith in public institutions and rapacious tax and other official policies that they ‘go John Galt’ by opting out, one way or the other:

Perhaps the partisan politics we are dealing with now is really just a struggle between those of us who believe in productivity, personal responsibility, and keeping government interference to a minimum, and those who believe in the socialistic policies of taking from others, using the government as a watchdog, and rewarding those who overspend, underwork, or are just plain unproductive.

No perhaps about it, if you ask me.

Can exasperated voters who want small(er) better government have a say, simply voting not to pay certain taxes any more? They are trying this line of attack in Massachusetts. Bring it on.

The problem is that Ayn Rand (rightly) dragged the argument right back to the absolute basic question of human existence: what right does anyone have over the mind (and therefore productivity) of another human being? If exchange of talent is not truly free, what is the moral justification for state compulsion?

In the book John Galt suffered for many years in isolation as he watched things decay. The State finally tries to torture him to try to force him to make available to ‘society’ his brilliance and output. The electric torture machine breaks down. Through his pain he tells his torturers how to fix it.

How many of us have that quite degree of fortitude when we face the folly of the state piling on ever more taxation to pay for ever-declining effectiveness?

To be continued…