Who Is Nhoj Tlag?

There a lot of talk about Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's dense, paperweight of a book out there in the conservative blogosphere. Rumors of rich people 'going Galt' and general predictions that Atlas will indeed shrug and it'll all come crashing down around everyone's ears...

But if you actually read the book, you'll understand that people are getting it backwards (as people often do):

In the book, rich (productive and self-made) people stop producing because the government is expropriating all their wealth and the fruits of their creative industry. In my mind (hence why John Galt is spelled backwards in the post title) what we have going on now is the opposite entirely.

In the book, the government is expropriating all this wealth ostensibly to 'redistribute the wealth' and 'spread it around.' To 'feed the nation' in other words- but our current situation is the opposite: the rich AND the government (our political and monied elites being increasingly one in the same) are taking the people's wealth and misusing it to protect their own power base.

If anyone needs to 'Go Galt' it's not the rich- they're taking- it's the ordinary people who are seeing no tangible benefits from all this bloated spending (at least thus far) and it is all of us that need to 'Go Galt.' Then let's see how long Washington and New York can last.