Getting the Hell Out of Their Way

In one of the climatic
scenes in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, John
Galt, the philosopher/scientist who is a prisoner of the government, is taken
to a televised banquet in an upscale New York hotel, arranged by the government
to show the world its new savior and to hear how he plans to save it. He is
prodded, with a gun stuck into his ribs through his tuxedo jacket, to make a
speech about how he would go about doing it. After all, his captors believe
that because he is a brilliant man, his brilliance can save their lives and the
nation. All he need do is think and issue orders.*



The camera moved to Galt. He remained
still for a moment. Then, with so swift and expert a movement that his secretary's
hand was unable to match it, he rose to his feet, leaning sidewise, leaving the
pointed gun momentarily exposed to the sight of the world – then, standing
straight, facing the cameras, looking at all his invisible viewers, he said:



"Get the hell out of my
way!"



Galt was expected,
urged, and begged to become the nation's economic dictator. He refuses. His mind
cannot be forced to solve a problem he does not wish to solve. Only he has
solved this particular one: The world can be saved – and the world can save
itself – by allowing him the freedom to think and to act, with no penalties, obstructions,
regulations, or force. He does not want to be a dictator. He does not think
that he needs anyone's or any government's permission to act in freedom. He wants
to be left alone to live his own life. What his captors do not understand is
that a mind cannot be forced to think. They do not understand that he would not
accept an impossible task, such as being Chairman of the Federal Reserve, or
Secretary of the Treasury, or an "economic czar" with the power to order,
force, or defraud a nation's citizens to act this way or that way. He refuses
out of self-respect and respect for his fellow men.



That is the light
side of this column.



On the dark side,
we have "Head of State" Barack Hussein Obama, whose snarling leitmotif
throughout his whole administration, on the campaign trail and over the last
four years, has been another kind of "Get the hell out of my way!"



This is the demand,
order, and wish of a tyrant, or of a wannabe dictator. He has his own
"plan" to save the nation, to save the world. Reality gets in his
way. Private citizens get in his way. He wants reality and those citizens to
get out of it. He throws tantrums when he does not get his way, or is asked
questions he cannot answer without lying, or when Congress or some
"old" thing like an article of the Constitution frustrates his plans.
He gloats and smirks when he does get his way with all the panache of streetthug who has "proven" to his ilk that he is an Alpha Male not to be
"messed with."  



John Galt, as the
novel reveals, is a scientist, inventor, and creator. Barack Obama is a
non-entity who has created nothing. Literally. John Galt is a life-giver. Obama
is a nihilist and life-taker. Literally.



In truth, Obama has
no "plan," except to impose an authoritarian or totalitarian régime on
the country – somehow. He is a nihilist of the pragmatic stripe. Some things he
has gotten away with, some he has not.  It
is too soon to impose complete, one-man rule. He knows that much. But, like all
seekers after power, his intelligence is feral, predatory, cunning, and
non-conceptual. He is the heir-apparent of a "progressive"
disintegration of the rule of law.



Obama can only work
from a "feel" for his enemies' weaknesses, and seek to exploit them. He
is a collectivist ideologue who has no idea of how to impose his will on the
country, except to cajole it through rhetoric and from a literal "bully
pulpit," with the emphasis on bully.
Or force. He has thrashed around for four years experimenting with various kinds
of statist policies, largely at the country's expense, hoping that they would work
and prove the efficacy of that force. He has exhibited an affinity for and an
empathy with contemporary tyrants, such as Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hugo
Chavez of Venezuela.



That force, after
all, according to the altruist code of ethics, was intended to "do
good."



It is appropriate
that his practical ideological mentor
was not Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, or even Adolf Hitler, but a
man who honed his "community organizing" skills and methodology by
hanging out with Chicago gangsters, that patron saint of intimidation and
isolating and targeting, Saul Alinsky.



He was successful in flattering
himself (his characterization) into the Capone organization and became a
trusted fellow traveler for "two years" according to his estimate. In
fact, the influence of the Capone gang on Alinsky is substantial and lasted for
more than two years.



"He introduced me to Frank
Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone's number-two man, and actually in de facto
control of the mob because of Al's income-tax rap. Nitti took me under his
wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti's boys took me
everywhere, showed me all the mob's operations, from gin mills and whorehouses
and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take
over. Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob inside
out."  Alinsky’s self-identification
of Frank Nitti the mobster killer as his "professor" is important. In
retrospect one can speculate that Alinsky learned a great deal about pressure
and intimidation from his friends in the Chicago mob.



But even more enlightening is
that the mob killer Nitti is the anti-thesis of what America is about;
amorality and criminality were what Alinsky apparently found so fascinating
about Nitti and his gang- they beat “the system” which Alinsky saw as just as
corrupt or equally so to the Capone/Nitti gangsters.



This is not a
minor, incidental, or arbitrarily juxtaposed point. I stress it because, as criminals
and criminal gangs employ force to impose their will on their victims, so do
statist governments. The Prohibition or Volstead Act of 1918, for example, sired
the creation and growth of large-scale gangs dedicated to violating the ban on
the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol. These gangs also
intended to "do good" by supplying the nation with alcohol, as well
as exploiting other prohibited or regulated realms such as gambling and prostitution
(the gangs would later expand into drugs). In every enterprise of these gangs,
force, extortion, blackmail, and fraud were their governing "ethics."




The crucial symbiosis,
in means and in ends, between government and "private" force is all
too apparent. Differing only in scale, they have ever complemented each other
throughout human history.



And, Obama has to
his credit several instances of speech that comports with his thuggishleitmotif, among them, “If they bring aknife to the fight, we bring a gun,” and, "Argue with neighbors, getin their face."



In Atlas Shrugged, the statists bypass –
and for all practical purposes, suspend – the Constitution (never actually
mentioned in the novel) by enacting Directive 10-289, which freezes all
creative and productive activity and expropriates property and wealth for the
duration of an "emergency" whose cause is government interventionist policies.
I discuss the ramifications of the National Defense Authorization Act in a
Capitalism Magazine article from March of this year. Ostensibly, the NDAA
simply details how federal expenditures will be distributed.  However, a few brief, innocuous, but buried paragraphs
in the NDAA grant the government, Congress, and especially the executive
branch, dictatorial powers over the entire nation in the name of an undefined
"emergency," and effectively suspend the writ of habeas corpus, the
right to a trial, and sanctions indefinite detention – of American citizens.



The most notable
precedent for this is when Hitler got the Reichstag to suspend the WeimarConstitution.



After the Reichstag fire of 28
February 1933, clauses of the Weimar Constitution guaranteeing personal liberty
and freedom of speech, of the press, of association and assembly, were suspended…The
Reich President was authorized, "if public safety and order in the German
Reich are considerably disturbed or endangered," to take steps to suspend
"the Fundamental Rights…"



This was the
lead-up to Hitler's much-sought-after "Enabling Law" that would grant
him unlimited executive powers.



On 28 February 1933, the Nazi
conspirators, taking as their excuse a fire which had just destroyed the
Reichstag building, caused to be promulgated a Decree of the Reich President
suspending the constitutional guarantee of freedom. This decree, which
purported to be an exercise of the powers of the Reich President under Article
48 (2) of the Constitution, and which was signed by the Reich President,
Hindenburg, the Reich Chancellor, Hitler, the Reich Minister of the Interior,
Frick, and the Reich- Minister of Justice, Guertner, provided in part:



"Sections 114, 115, 117,
118, 123, 124, and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended
until further notice. Thus, restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of
free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of
assembly and the right of association, and violations of the privacy of postal,
telegraphic, and telephonic communications, and warrants for house-searchers,
orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also
permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed."



As Leonard Peikoff
has noted, "An executive with unlimited power is the definition of a
totalitarian leader." When everything is permissible by edict, executive
order, or legislative fiat, then nothing can or will restrain the employment of
government force.



John Galt's
"Get the hell out of my way" is the expression of a man who knows he
owns his own life and warns his obstructers and enslavers that they will get
nothing from him if they continue their policies of force, sacrifice and
destruction. Obama's "Get the hell out of my way" is the expression
of a tyrant and sociopath who wants his wishes and whims realized without
reality and men getting in his way. It is the John Galts of the world from whom
he demands respect, deference, dependence, and obedience.



And it is the John Galts
of the world who will not submit and who will not sanction the Obamas of the
world the right to one second of his life.  



The question for
Americans, now that they face four more years of Obama, is: Are they John Galts,
or are they craven submitters counting on being rewarded whatever messes of
pottage their masters deign to dole out?



*Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. 1957.
p. 1125. Dutton/New American Library, 1992. 35th Anniversary Edition.