And how are they connected?
First, “going Galt”: This from The Lonely Conservative blog: Barely two days after Obama’s re-election, the following posting appeared: “It begins — Producers Already Going Galt“:
In Las Vegas, a business owner with 114 employees is letting go 22 of those employees because he knows Obamacare won’t be repealed.
A doctor in Nebraska has been telling his patients…he has no intentions of working for the government; he has purchased property in another country and he really plans to leave.
An executive for a major Midwestern corporation has been contemplating relocation in order to continue working for the company that has employed her for more than three decades. Obama’s re-election has finalized her decision. “I’m done,” she says at the peak of her career. “There’s no way I’m going back to this level of work and stress and taxation. I’m going Galt. You’d be surprised how cheaply I can live. They can tax somebody else.”
I’m sure there are plenty more out there who wish they could just quit. But those of us with families have no choice but to continue working and feeding this beast. But we can have an effect in other ways. It’s probably a good idea to severely limit spending on anything that isn’t necessary to survival. Not only will it be my own small way of protesting, it also makes perfect economic sense for our family. May as well start saving for the even tougher economic times ahead.
Now to “Irish Democracy,” an ironic term used by author and Yale professor James Scott in his new book, “Two Cheers for Anarchism“:
Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous, lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous….One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish Democracy”—the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people—than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.
Must this be the default response to an ever-growing federal government unbound from any meaningful Constitutional limits, metastasizing and increasingly contemptuous of any law deemed inconvenient to the ruling political classes?
Many millions will vote on the question.