I dont really feel guilty about it, its just maddening. A good example is that I have to report in great detail my employees' wages to the government. They made ME their agent in perpetrating the crime of taking their money away from them. Its up to the government, at least in my view, to effectively force me under direct threats to do their bidding, and I would simply stop doing it anytime I could "get away with it".. Regarding payroll taxes, they have a very effective and direct method of forcing me to comply, but I hate giving in to it.

I can remember back in the day when there was NO withholding of money from paychecks. I am sure we will never go back to that now, but it was preferable to the current system for us citizens.

Continuing resolutions are postponements of detailed budgets, agreeing to continue current levels of spending as a kind of appropriation. The Republicans have been passing budgets, even though no one knows most of what is in them. That is a default on responsibility, and is inevitable given the scope of government they accept, but it is what Congress, not the president, does when it approves spending.

You are not using your own hand to make them more powerful. They are using your hand under threat of force. There is a lot to feel "bad" about in that, but any kind of guilt over "supporting" them, as if you are doing it "willingly", should not be not among it.

Assuming they actually pass a budget, which has not happened in the last few years, all they have run on is continuing resolutions, meaning they never get to actually considering how much they are blowing.....

I agree its not the same as voluntarily paying to the statists. I write them checks, but I feel BAD about doing it, knowing that I am using my own hand to make them more powerful.

Presidents propose a budget but Congress appropriates the money through annual appropriations and permanent Congressionally approved entitlements -- except under Obama with a Democrat Congress that abdicated so Obama could illegally spend what he wanted.

Paying taxes under physical threat is not "willing". The threat to make you pay is that if you don't they will do more than just take it. It's bad enough that the bureaucrats sometimes harass and persecute people out of suspicion, paranoia and politics even though no taxes are legally owed without provoking them.

I stand corrected, as the true overall numbers (this was from a Forbes article discussing deficits actually rung up by the last 5 Presidents) indicate no President ever had a surplus, and some of the worst ones had things like TARP involved that skewed things even worse:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesgla...
The overall increases get even more skewed if you measure them by percentage of debt to each President, Obama added 8 Trillion to the debt, and it surprisingly drops little over the last 5. FDR had the largest percentage increase going from 23 Billion left by Hoover, to 250 billion, but 210 billion was spent on WW2. Yet FDR's percentage was a whopping 1,046%. Overall, no president has ever NOT increased the debt. The rate is accelerating as they keep spending more on whatever the hell they want. I hate to see what Trump comes out at.

https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by...

When I say willingly, j mean we write checks for taxes and we pay the sales taxes, True it’s under threat of jail so it’s not that we agree with the charges, but we could just NOT pay and let them just take it

We don't willingly support it. We try to live in spite of it. If the US collapsed into full statism it would be much worse than a second rate banana republic like Venezuela, and would have global consequences much more severe.

When I quit I never thought it would do anything but free me from the regulations stopping me from inventing and producing what I had invented for my customers.

If it were possible to start up and defend a galts gulch, I would check out moving there and would encourage others of like mind to
do the same. I agree that It would not cause the statist USA to change into a free society but it would accelerate the decline of the USA into a Venezuela type state as it’s wealth declined.

It’s very disturbing that we all willingly support statism in the pursuit of our own lives.

Ayn Rand spoke at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston from 1961 to 1981. Look at the list at https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/govern... and you may recognize the one you attended. When she died in 1982 Leonard Peikoff continued there for many years.

"Ford Hall" was an annual celebration that drew fans from across the country and sometimes foreign countries. The auditorium was packed, usually with an overflow crowd listening from outside the auditorium. The lectures were followed by questions from the audience lining up in the aisles to try to find out more on all kinds of topics. Some were also followed by a book-signing and further questions, with a long line of fans stretching out across the room and out into the lobby, eager to meet her. That was followed by informal gatherings in Boston and Cambridge as friends got together for further celebration and discussion.

Who among us has not encountered at some point punishment from government policy that caused us to stop doing something? Who with any kind of self esteem would not revolt? But that is all it is, not a "strike" intended or expected to itself change some policy, let alone the direction of the country. (J Brenner on this forum encountered the same kind of punishment for medical devices in the same field as you, most recently because of the Obamacare tax.)

Ayn Rand did not misjudge the attraction of collectivism or its cause: the intellectuals constantly preaching altruism and collectivism then using them as justification for public pronouncements and government policy.

You must not support or condone it, but that doesn't mean to "strike" and try to collapse the economy; and it won't change without replacing the ideas with reason and individualism. Quit yourself and no one will notice, let alone change policy because of it. The most that happens when it occurs on a large scale is that people start to notice a shortage of competence and quality that they used to take for granted. Those who understand why quietly remark, "Atlas is shrugging"; the rest have no idea and keep following the same path.

I went to see aybbrand speak at the ford hall one time when I was in college. I don’t remember if she only spoke there once, but if that was the one time she spoke there, I was there. I had just read atlas shrugged and the story was so moving that I did little else but read it for 3 days. I really don’t have any inside information about why she
wrote the novel, but I do remember she was very upset and disappointed that it was pretty much ignored. I have seen in my own life the folly of Dagny taggart and hank
Rearden and the truth of orren Boyle comment about tearden’s success will enable them to bring him down. The fact of this all is that collectivism demotivates human beings. I was a successful innovator in medical device manufacturing, but got out of the business when the medical device regulations came in 1976. I did a “dagny” thing for a few years until the fda required premarket approval from them before I could make any medical device not substantially similar to one that was in commercial production in 1976. That was essentially the end of small company innovation

By 1991. I was able to sell the companies I had started and was done with medical devices. Now I make off road lighting, still free of regulations.

Every dollar I make and am forced to give to the statists only makes them stronger and allows them to steal from me even more. The “strike “ element of John galt lives in us all and is the underlying reason statist civilizations fail

Is AR thought AS would awaken some people, she was right. But she misjudged the attraction of collectivism. I don’t understand it, but it amazes me that the abject failure of it in the world is just passed over and the obvious solution rejected.

This is why I think that a simple refusal to support statism in any way might be the only way to stop it. What’s happening now is not an organized strike , but an unorganized reduction in the desire to work under the regulations and taxation

She didn't say she wrote the book as a warning of what would happen. While she was writing the book (for the purposes described above), over that about ten year period she became discouraged by the parallels between the plot she had developed and what she saw was happening. She found it hard to write about a collapse while it was in essence depressingly coming true before her very eyes. She said she motivated herself to keep writing by telling herself that her book was to prevent it from happening -- by showing how rational people should think and act in contrast.

After she arrived in this country, she had always wanted to prevent the US from following what she had seen in Russia and in Europe because upon arriving here she found the same collectivist ideas being promoted and gradually implemented. But her primary goal was to portray her idea of the ideal man and what is proper for man, a goal for fiction she had formed while still in Russia, and AS remained a statement of what should be and the ideas required for it, not just a warning of the negative, let alone a call to 'strike' against it as a means to correct it.

When AS was finished and she saw the difficulties of getting it published for its ideas, and saw its hostile treatment by almost all intellectuals in the reviews, she was discouraged. She had expected that intelligent people would immediately recognize what she was saying and embrace it. Instead she encountered the swill in The New York Times, and Whittaker Chambers in William Buckley's National Review.

After she saw the hostile reaction she decided to start lecturing and writing on non-fiction to explain her philosophy more explicitly. As part of that she observed, as in her 1964 Ford Hall Forum lecture "Is Atlas Shrugging?" https://estore.aynrand.org/p/11/is-at..., how productive people were cutting back in response to punishment and explained the solution; she never advocated a 'strike' as a means of reform.

When she decided to write a novel with a plot-theme based on showing the importance of the mind in human survival by showing in the plot what happens when it is withdrawn, the logic of her philosophy had to predict also what was happening in reality. But she didn't start out to write a warning.

In "Is Atlas Shrugging?" she said that her purpose was “not to boast nor to leave you with the impression that I possess some mystical gift of prophecy, but to demonstrate the exact opposite: that that gift is not mystical. . . .history is not an unintelligible chaos ruled by chance and whim—historical trends can be predicted, and changed.

“There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man's rational faculty—the power of ideas. If you know a man's convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course.”

“Atlas Shrugged is not,” she said, “a prophecy of our unavoidable destruction, but a manifesto of our power to avoid it, if we choose to change our course.” The power to avoid it is the power of the rational mind armed with the right ideas, not an a-philosophical 'strike' expected to correct the course of the nation without regard for the ideas required.

That took a few days to mull over what you said. I can see your points, but I am having some trouble integrating that with AR being interviewed and saying that she wrote the book as a warning of what would happen if things kept on the current track. She was very upset that the warning was not heeded

More of a matter of degree. Look st the attitudes and actions of obama

The rumors about Clinton murders do not make her Putin and his secret police apparatus, and there is a lot more to life in Russia versus the US.

I am not so sure in principle there is much difference. Go against Putin and you might find. Yourself dead. Go against Clinton and quite few have been mysteryiously found desf

It isn't hard to distinguish between the Soviet Union or contemporary fascist Russia versus the mixed economy of the US.

It’s hard to separate out these -ism variations when socialism, fascism, communism, and what we have here. All take my freedom and the fruits of my work

Think in essentials with concepts for understanding, not barnyard imagery.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck....

Well said

Increased revenue from tax cuts improving the economy is an unfortunate side-effect of tax cuts. They have converted it into the goal, and they still don't like the cuts they call giveaways to the "rich".

There were no surpluses during Reagan's administration, or any other administration for a very long time. Revenues from taxes increased under Reagan and spending and the debt increased more.

There's the illogic of the whole system, and the illustration of this is just a manipulation of the laws to feed their own special interests. If they did "cut" everyone's taxes, there would be less direct revenue from them, but more from increased economic activity. That has been proven true, most recently after Regan, when we had surpluses, which never went to retire the debt...