Saturday, May 19, 2012

Boys and Girls Gone Wild

For the last couple of weeks I have been discussing the countries in Central America which might have some appeal to Americans who would consider becoming "Ex patriots".  Within the column I have referred several times to the book, Atlas Shrugged a novel by Ayn Rand.

It seemed particularly relevant to me as I watch the machinations of our present Administration and Congress. The book explores a United States where many of society's most productive citizens refuse to be exploited by increasing taxation and government regulations and so they simply disappear. If you check the headlines today, people are not so much disappearing as they are relocating.  Major companies are making their off-shore subsidiaries into their new headquarters with a couple of strokes of a pen--for them this changes the tax structure they have to live under.


Individual citizens are researching the viability of moving to other countries to protect the wealth they have built over a lifetime of work and investment.  The dollar continues to cheapen making everything--even  foods and commodities more expensive.  As the dollar "shrinks", the cost of everything increases.  The increases are not smooth, but you'll see, they are coming.  As our Administration allows the printing of more paper dollars you'll be able to watch your weekly expenses grow.  This is the cost we all pay to support the Boys and Girls Gone Wild in Washington.


The news media likes to point to the cost of gasoline as the flag flown to show how bad inflation is--and yet now gasoline is getting cheaper.  But in truth, all prices fluctuate, just note that what's cheaper today will be more expensive tomorrow, and vice versa.  To see what's going on watch the cost of a restaurant meal, or a dozen eggs, or the increases in your insurance bills and electricity at your house. It's like we're all in a big partially filled swimming pool, and the water level is rising. Before long, the shorter ones of us will notice the rising water level, but soon enough we'll all see the effect.


Of course real estate is also a commodity.  Prices of real estate will also rise as the dollar gets weaker. That's a good thing if you are a property owner and have the idea you will hold property for a price increase.  But if you buy a house at market rate today for, say $200,000, and if inflation is at 10% a year, in five years the cost of the same house will be in the range of $300,000.  It seems like you've made money, but the difference is not because the house has additional value, but because our "coin of the realm": the dollar, will have lost that much purchasing power.


And so it is that Atlas Shrugged seems even more relevant today.  In spite of the fact the book deals with the captains of industry, and not so much the folks up and down main street, none the less, the needs and desires of all of us are the same.  The business mavins are led by John Galt into a general strike against the events of the day--not too dissimilar to Greece or Spain or Occupy Wall Street--except on an executive level. Galt describes the strike as "stopping the motor of the world" by withdrawing the minds that drive society's growth and productivity.


In their efforts, these people "of the mind" hope to demonstrate that a world in which the individual is not free to create is doomed, that civilization cannot exist where every person is a slave to society and government, and that the destruction of the profit motive leads to the collapse of society. The protagonist, Dagny Taggart, sees society collapse around her as the government increasingly asserts control.
Rand's heroes must continually fight against "parasites", "looters", and "moochers" who demand the benefits of the heroes' labor. Atlas Shrugged has been called an apocalyptic vision of the last stages of conflict between two classes of humanity – the looters and the non-looters. The looters are proponents of high taxation, big labor, government ownership, government spending, government planning, regulation, and redistribution."

"Looters" confiscate others' earnings by force and include government officials, whose demands are backed by the implicit threat of force. Some officials are merely executing government policy, such as those who confiscate one state's seed grain to feed the starving citizens of another; others are exploiting those policies. Both use force to take property from the people who produced or earned it.

"Moochers" demand others' earnings on behalf of the needy and those unable to earn themselves; however, they curse the producers who make that help possible and are jealous and resentful of the talented on whom they depend. They are ultimately as destructive as the looters – destroying the productive through guilt, and appealing to "moral right" while enabling the "lawful" looting performed by governments.

Looting and mooching are seen at all levels of the world Atlas Shrugged portrays, from the looting officials Dagny Taggart must work around and the mooching brother Hank Rearden struggles with, to the looting of whole industries and the mooching demands for foreign aid by the starving countries of Europe.

Atlas Shrugged is a great work and worth the read.
Dane Hahn is a real estate professional practicing in Englewood Florida,  He can be reached at dane.hahn@gmail.com.  See him on the net at www.danesellsflorida.com

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