GM goes Galt

Did you notice anything strange in the news today about General Motors?

First, CNBC reported that the struggling automaker is considering moving its headquarters out of Detroit

Then the news broke that six top GM executives had sold their personal holdings of the company's stock, sending the share price to a 76-year low.

And then Automotive News revealed that General Motors plans to import and sell Chinese-built cars in the United States.

Taken together, these stories paint a picture of a silent, decaying factory, the empty shell of what once was a thriving engine of wealth and progress for investors, customers, and employees.

Have you read Atlas Shrugged yet?

Ayn Rand's original title for the 1957 book was "The Strike." The novel is the story of "the mind on strike," or what happens to a collectivist society when the men of the mind withdraw their services and disappear.

In the book, successful business owners, scientists, artists, and industrialists are secretly persuaded by an inventor named John Galt to walk away, and even to destroy their own companies, rather than have the product of their efforts seized for the "collective good."

At the end of the novel, John Galt tells off the looters and moochers in control of the government, and all the voters who put them there.

"When you failed to give recognition to man's mind and attempted to rule human beings by force," he says, "those who submitted had no mind to surrender; those who had, were men who don't submit."

You really ought to read it. Apparently the guys at GM did.


Copyright 2009