I have a co-worker—I am not sure his salary, though considering his position it is likely in the $150,000 range—who is fervently wishing for a John Galtian revolution.
(For any who may not know the John Galt reference, he is the main character is Ayn Rand's perennial doorstop, Atlas Shrugged. If you want to know the basics of the book without actually having to go through the painful process of reading it, I recommend this very on-target summary.
To make it very short, John Galt is a producing, wealthy capitalist who abandons society because his superiority is not sufficiently appreciate by the worthless non-producers always looking for a handout.
'Who is John Galt' has become one of the catchphrases of teabaggers, although I coubt many of them have actually slogged through the tedious tome.
[Updated to fix math]
This co-worker of mine loves to come into my office and tell me that people such as himself will simply quit working if they have to pay more of their income in taxes, since it is no longer worth their time. Yet on other occasions, he has complained about people agitating for a ‘living wage’.
Let’s do some math. Currently his wages average out to about $75 dollars an hour. If he were paying 50% in taxes (on ALL his wages, not just the last marginal dollar, which is how our taxes actually work), his take home would equal about $37.50. Apparently, $37.50 is such a ridiculously low wage that he would simply stay home. Yet in the next breath, he will argue that anyone not willing to work a minimum wage job is a lazy loser, or that people who think they deserve ‘living wages’ of $10-$12 an hour are expecting far too much.
So let me get this straight. For him, $37.50 an hour is so absurdly low that he would no longer get out of bed. Yet some poor peon making only 20% of that absurdly low wage is a jerk for complaining. And that’s BEFORE their taxes—and yes, people making minimum wage pay taxes.
And thus we get to the heart of the John Galtian conservatives—they are elitists. They consider themselves aristocrats who are so much better than their fellow Americans that their expectations should be calibrated altogether differently. What to them is no money at all should be utterly satisfactory for the peons.
Of course, there is a conservative response. These people, you say, work harder and invested more in education, so they have a right to expect far far more than their lessers. Nonsense. My mother-in-law worked in a factory for more than 40 years. She worked herself to the bone, and it broke her body. I, with my master’s degree and my cushy corporate job, make a good deal more than she ever did, and my work is more comfortable, enjoyable, and fulfilling. Of course not everyone can make the same amount of money. But the ranges we are talking about here are extreme.
The Galtians are essentially Raskolnikov—they believe they are ‘super-men’, that they are intrinsically better than the schlubs who do the dull and dirty jobs that help make society run, and that they are bound by a completely different set of rules. A person should be pleased to make less than $7 an hour, but if a superman can only make $32.50, it is insulting to him, and he should take his toys and go home.
That’s not my only problem with the Galtians—there is also the issue of the moral importance of good work. I find the idea distasteful that one ONLY works hard in order to make money, and cares nothing about what he is doing for his community and his world. But that is a different argument for a different diary.