Glenn Beck – after reading ad copy urging his listeners to buy Rough Greens and Relief Factor, which constitutes the bulk of his show – said something so spectacularly wrong the other day that I could not let it pass without comment.
He compared Elon Musk with John Galt – the fictional character created by Ayn Rand in her novel Atlas Shrugged, which was about capitalism. Not crony capitalism. More finely, rent-seeking masquerading as capitalism. The leveraging of government force to get rich. The redistribution of – as opposed to the creation of – wealth.
What are carbon credits?
They are a wealth redistribution scheme. Company A produces something of value for which there is a market, established by the fact that people are willing to exchange their money for it. Like a truck with a V8 engine (or a car with a V6 engine). But the government says these things produce more “carbon” than it says is allowable – according to an arbitrary standard it lays down based on assertions that “carbon” is causing the “climate” to “change.”
The government – more finely, the regulatory bureaucracy – says this excess “emitting” of “carbon” must be cancelled out via either the production of vehicles that “emit” no “carbon” at all – at the tailpipe – for which there is no (or very little market)Â or via the purchase of credits from another producer of such vehicles in lieu of producing them.
Obviously, none of this form of exchange is voluntary.
That is how Tesla – which is Elon Musk’s electric vehicle operation – funded itself, in the manner of a tick feasting on the blood of a dog. The “carbon credit” being a kind of transfer tax imposed by the government but collected by a for-profit corporation. It is how Tesla sucked dry the once-successful Chrysler, Dodge, Ram and Jeep brands that are now rustling shells of their former selves. When you bought a V8 Ram or Charger or Chrysler 300, part of what you paid – assuming you could afford to – went to Tesla and thus to Musk.
What is a carbon tax?
It is a tax designed to economically punish the use of “too much” energy, defined as that which exceeds your “carbon footprint” – which is defined (arbitrarily, once again) as the the amount of “carbon” your existence generates. If you drive too much – or eat too much meat or keep your house too warm or your house is too large – then you have exceeded the allowable size of your “carbon footprint” and are tax-punished accordingly. The government – which collects the tax – is enriched while you are diminished.
Elon Musk is a proponent of taxing “carbon.” Naturally. He believes the “climate” is “changing” and – much more important – his lifestyle will not be diminished because he could lose 90 percent of his wealth and still be richer than 90 percent of us.
He also stands to benefit from such a tax since his “carbon footprint” is considered small because his battery-powered vehicles are considered to have no “footprint” at all – because they do not produce any “carbon” directly. The “carbon” created indirectly by the manufacture and associated activities involved in making tens of thousands of enormous lithium-ion batteries and pumping them full of electricity is not counted toward the size of his “footprint.” But your gas-powered truck’s “emissions” are. And also your steak dinner and the fact that you turned up the thermostat in your house to keep warm.
What is digital money? It is non-physical money over which you have the illusion of control. Put another way, it is a medium of exchange that only works as long as the digital-electronic mechanisms that you have no control over allow. It can, in other words, be used to control what you are allowed to spend – and on what and how much. You have exceeded the allowable size of your carbon footprint this month – but it’s not yet next month? Well, for the remainder of this month, your digital purchasing power will be limited and there is nothing you can do to get around it. You wave your device at the scanner to pay for the groceries on the conveyer belt but the purchase won’t go through.
No steak for you.
Elon Musk is proponent of digital money (DOGE and Bitcoin, specifically). He is also a recipient of great tranches of government money via his Space X operation. It is not funded by this billionaire. It is funded by taxpayers – who are forced to fund it.
John Galt spent the entire novel battling such rent-seeking, cronyism and grift. He did it chiefly by persuading the productive to stop aiding their exploiters and (ultimately) their destroyers by going on strike. He did not urge them to get rich by getting in bed with the government. He had nothing but contempt for the force and fraud that is the essence of government. He believed in the absolute sovereignty of the individual and that personal worth was a function of the creative capacity expressed via productive work the value of which was measured by the free approbation of the market. That honest wealth did not require anyone else’s wealth to create it.
His symbol was the dollar sign and his coin was gold.
No man could be less Galt-like than Elon Musk – down to the humblest street sweeper, who does honest work and earns his money by providing value for value and without the intermediary of coercion.
Steve Jobs was Galt-like. Preston Tucker is another. Musk is a predatory parody of Galt. One that’s as funny as a basket of dead rabbits.
. . .
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This is John Galt speaking.
I agree with Eric Peters.
Elon Musk is a grifter and the AS character he most reminds me of is James Taggart.
Elon has no idea of how much damage he has caused with his stupid electric vehicle that will not solve one problem. An idiocrat none can compare. GFY
Just another firebug is all.
He can Go Galt and stop right now.
If you are a freelance firebug, paid to do the job, you fly to LA during the Santa Ana windstorms, wait until nightfall, make your way up the canyon and set the woods on fire.
Sleep all day, set fires all night. The A-Team, that is the arson team, can do the job.
Gotta be one arson fire after another.
People are suffering and are in desperate need of help.
People in Gaza are in need and do need help too.
If you politicians want death and destruction, the chickens have come home to roost right before your lying eyes.
Sow the wind, reap a whirlwind.
Done deal in LA.
Way to go, Joe!
I feel your blood pressure increasing, Eric. It isn’t worth it. This is all for play.
Do you know the secret of every successful business owner? The ability to read the people that they are selling their product or service to. Sure, the product and service has to be good (or at least functional) for business to continue, but all business people are salesmen. The best transform themselves into what the buyer wants. This will be different for each potential customer. Don’t believe me? Look at what is happening right now in our country. Silicon Valley, actors, news media, and politicians are untying the ropes of DIE/ESG initiatives, they are visiting Mar-a-Lago and bending the knee, they are speaking out against men in women’s sports, and chopping off children’s genitalia. Where were they four years ago or a decade ago? Quiet as a church mouse or loud promoters of climate change and wokeism.
What has changed? The energy in the room. If a business person wishes to make money (big money) they scrap what is no longer selling. They sell what the audience is interested in and they become that personality to make the sell.
Is it right? No. Is it principled? Also, no. But, it happens all the time.
People like Trump, Musk, and Zuckerberg are enigmas. Do they believe what they are selling? Sometimes. I don’t paint these people as intentionally evil (you and I will probably disagree on this point) I view them as the salesmen that they are. None of us know anyone until we meet them behind closed doors. Every sales poly is a lesson in psychology…we need to be attuned to that and respond accordingly.
One of the root causes of my tinnitus came to mind as I read this:
Wheels within wheels in a spiral array
A pattern so grand and complex
Time after time we lose sight of the way
Our causes can’t see their effects
…
Computerized clinic
For superior cynics
Who dance to a synthetic band
In their own image
Their world is fascist*
No wonder they don’t understand
…
The most endangered species
The honest man
Will still survive annihilation
Forming a world
State of integrity
Sensitive, open and strong
Neil Peart & Rush, Natural Science
People create their own world view. But the media is always looking for someone to prop up as a false god. Musicians, actors, pop writers are always good for a headline. In the 1960s it was astronauts and Chuck Yeager. But of course they all have feet of clay. Occasionally a businessman will get some traction. Jobs was no Galt. But he was also smart enough to project a proper image to the world to sell product. Musk seems to have no one to help him maintain his mystique, but after Jobs died the media needed another business hero, and clearly Larry Ellison wasn’t going to be it. So Musk it was. And because their world is fascist, they don’t understand that he’s just the natural and scientific outcome of it.
Rand wrote A is A (or A=A). At the time I got what she was saying, but really only the last few years did it hit home for me. Boy is boy. Girl is girl. The honest man turned to Trump and Musk because that’s who we have to work with. Will we survive annihilation? So far we haven’t been doing so well. We used the ballot box. The left has begun using the flamethrower. Will the honest man have the stomach to use the ammo can?
*Actual lyric is “fashion,” but what my 15 year old ears heard out of my Yorx stereo was “fascist.” It stuck and is a better line anyway.
Glen Beck is the kind of person who, if he told me water was good for me, I would automatically believe the opposite. As for Musk, he just comes across as being creepy as hell even before he speaks.
He’s chasing his audience. Unfortunately that means he’s playing the same game Lamebaugh played during the Bush administration, no matter what happened Bush was GOAT. Rush got a free night in the Lincoln bedroom. What with Beck get?
Glenn Beck actually compared Elon Musk with John Galt? That’s about as laughable as if someone were to compare Tony Fauci with the late Mother Teresa. I suppose next, there’ll be people comparing Joe Biden (who is the worst President in my lifetime) with some of the better presidents we’ve had in history after Biden leaves office next week.
If we were getting a President Kamala Harris next week instead of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk was trying to get in with the incoming administration while pushing carbon taxes, there’d likely be MASSIVE opposition from conservative leaning people toward such taxes instead of comparisons to John Galt. With Elon Musk and some of the other things he’s pushing in addition to carbon taxes, it’s best to watch what he DOES as opposed to what he SAYS.
They’ll prop up economic figures and compare “growth” from the dead bottom of COVID lockdowns and point out “well, akshually, the Biden administration oversaw one of the greatest periods of (insert whatever BS stat they want) since (whatever phony timeline they use).” Or they’ll use non-inflation adjusted GDP. Or some such other nonsense to come up with a positive spin.
“He got us out of Afghanistan!” never mentioning the shit show.
Beck should be looked at like the cartoonish clodhopper he is. He did some good work , exposing the Marxist/Bolshevik fever dreams of Oblahblah. But that was decades ago. Since then he’s taken a shine to NGOs helping Illegal Aliens…So, fuck that guy.
I always felt Elon could evolve into more of a Gail Wynand type character. Even though Wynand betrays Roarke, he did some good along the way. Worse than Elons rent seeking grift and all the other bad things you listed, is his drive to corral and tag humans with the internet of things. Best thing for the US would be Elon leading the first expedition to mars.
All these high profile supporters are just riding the wave of Trumps popularity for moar shekels. At some point, Trump will be left holding the flaming bag of shit the US is becoming. Trump will revel in it, claiming its a big, beautiful bag. In the end, the word Trump will become a verb, much like Munson became Munsoned in the movie Kingpin.
Glen Beck, Hannity and all those so-called “conservative” talk radio hosts are frauds. “Buck” Sexton is the son of a Manhattan billionaire and former (?) CIA, LOL.
Can you say “Operation Mockingbird,” kids???
Limbaugh was the real deal early in his career, a fat Midwestern corn-pone who shocked the Establishment by saying what average people really think. He was a sportsball fanboy doofus and naively believed wholeheartedly in the “American Dream” while jobs were being offshored to China and the economy was becoming financialized by the Wall Street Ponzi racket. Toward the end of his career he got co-opted into becoming a water-carrier for the Republican establishment and the Zionists.
“Conservative” media today is a grift, a scam. It’s all basically a pro-Zionist, neocon, warmongering Hasbara operation at this point.
The idea that a “conservative” talk show host could call the richest guy in the world and a rent-seeking grifter on the climate change racket a John Galt is absurd on the face of it, LOL.
Mark Levine is another one. Railing against Congress and Humus one moment and pushing office furniture a couple seconds later. These talk show hosts are only honest until they can get some big sponsors and then they show what they really believe in, and it’s not you and me.
And then there is Ben Shapiro as well…
Yes, Ben Shapiro is certainly odious.
Mark Levine is the worst. Could put Shapiro in as a close second. Hey, There just might be a pattern emerging here.
Beck seriously compared Musk to John Galt? Did he ever actually read the book? I don’t listen to Beck or any of the other talking heads –haven’t listened at all since Rush Limbaugh’s passing.
Yup, he did.
I almost put my fist through the VW’s touchscreen!
Spatula City!
Take the red pill, Rush. Now take the blue pill, next, the green pill. Time for the yellow pill is next.
What? I can’t hear you.
Spatula City!
That was a great song and commercial. The movie UHF was good also.
Hi Mike. If Musk was like Galt he would have shut down operations and moved away from the corruption to Galt’s Gulch and made his plans on what do do next, not siphon away as much money as he could from the American Taxpayer while shouting “Musk, Musk, Musk I’m the greatest” on Twatter.
‘His symbol was the dollar sign and his coin was gold.’ — eric
During WW I, when the Federal Reserve was striking up the band, it began accumulating small quantities of short-term debt to provide liquidity, as permitted by its enabling legislation.
By the middle of WW II, the Fed’s debt holdings (primarily Treasury obligations) exceeded its gold holdings for the first time.
Today, the frozen gold reserves (if they exist at all) are still valued at a derisory $42 an ounce, and constitute one minor entry at the bottom of its balance sheet. Paper and digital dollars are ALL debt-backed now. Pre-1964 silver certificates are collector’s items.
Smoking cigarettes with a gold dollar sign on them was a sassy thing to do in Ayn Rand’s time. Today, tobacco is b-a-a-a-a-a-d-d and the US dollar is a sick joke managed by idiot yenta Janet Yellen.
We modern-day Galts smoke pre-roll blunts with the Bitcoin symbol embossed on them. Heighth of fashion, as ol’ Holden Caulfield used to say. *flicks Bic*
p.s. Who made that sign in the lede photo, with the first line in regular sans serif font and the second line in condensed font?
Might as well be rendered in Comic Sans. Hell, add a third line: me so horny.
If Environmentalism is a religion, the Muskrat is the Pope.
Carbon Credits and digital currency make the Middle Age church practice of indulgences and tithes look modest by comparison. Have you prayed to St. Greta of Thunburg today? Did you stand naked in the storm to repent for not being vegan? Will you share videos of Bill Nye the Science Guy and Peter Hotez?
At some point this will break because it is simply not “sustainable”. People’s natural desire to live and avoid death will override this nonsense eventually. What comes after is anyone’s guess.
Also, I’m sure you will get some pushback on Rand and her writings. Objectivism is a fairly logical concept but, it’s morphed into a cult of personality with psychotic Jews at the helm…go figure.
>Carbon Credits and digital currency make the Middle Age church practice of indulgences and tithes look modest by comparison.
Well said, Mark.
Environmentalism is no longer a
science, but a religion.
Worship your god, Earth Mother Gaia