It feels like we're living in a real-world playout of "Atlas Shrugged". The article blames the jobs numbers on employee fears of the WuFlu-- and that may well be true, in the isolation of this specific report. But I'm also regularly seeing basic IT services going down for prolonged periods, airlines cancelling thousands of flights due to protesting pilots, huge shortages of electronics, major shipping delays due to an incredible lack of truck drivers, significant increases in food prices, rolling blackouts in places like England, and so forth.

In my workplace, I keep getting whiffs of the names of people who have left, and it reads like a "who's who" of some of the brightest, most ambitious people I've worked with. Recall that in the aforementioned Ayn Rand novel, by the end of the story New York City-- due to a combination of the smartest people "checking out" of the system, and bureaucrats and their grifter business pals taking control-- had no working electricity, massive snow drifts everywhere, no running infrastructure, and so forth. I think we're headed there.

I've also noticed over these years that Conservatives specifically have disappeared almost altogether: it used to be that half of journalists were Conservative, half of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were Conservative, and so on. Today, it's something like seventy to ninety-five percent of people in these fields are not just Lefties, but activist-types. Is there a "Galt's Gulch" somewhere about which I'm unaware?

True, in my current community the script is flipped: other than retired healthcare cartel doctors by the lake or a handful of idiots in the nearest town, it's probably ninety-five percent Conservative here. But population density is low here as well: it's not that many people in total; where have all the rest gone? At least many of the things I've been talking about on this blog, some of them for over a decade, are finally getting acknowledged by the mainstream. Take ganders at this, or this. In the latter case, Tucker didn't even get to interest rates, the manipulation of which are so harmful that they even put QE to shame.