For example a confluence of events were perfectly timed and located in my life which led to my ballroom dancing career. Young people were sick of 80's heavy metal and the emo-y, soppy, suicidal kirk cocaine crap that followed in the 90's. They were also sick of the depressing goth fashion that ensued. And soon a generation of young people discovered jazz, swing, suits and dresses, martinis, and then a Gap commercial came out to solidify it all. Swing dancing/ballroom dancing regained an incredible popularity, and I was there not only learning how to dance, but teach it to tens of thousands of suburbanite students. Being at the right place, at the right time, with the inclination of entrepreneurship made it so I could afford a house at a relatively young age. And I would not be where I am now if that storm never formed.
But today the entire US (even global) economy presents a similar "perfect storm" for the productive members of society. For whether intentionally or not, the world has created the perfect storm, and thus opportunity, for hard working people to give up, go galt, and not really suffer the consequences of not working. And if you are one of those productive members of society who is sick of being enslaved to the parasite welfare class of society, now is your "Ballroom Dancing Perfect Storm."
First, you have the Coronavirus which has cascaded a slew of consequences that created the environment we're in now. Joe Biden (as well as Donald Trump) effectively created a UBI on top of an already generous welfare program that made it so you don't have to work if you don't want to. COVID has also forced employers to acknowledge something we've all known to be true for 20 years - and that is nearly ALL white collar work can be done from home, eliminating the need for offices, commutes, traffic jams and strokes. COVID has also created a crisis wherein the government's response has been to mandate all employers mandate their employees to take a vaccine. But they've done it so heavy-handedly it has made what were already piss-poor employer-employee relations even worse.
And these are just the trends deriving from COVID
Second, these singular consequences of COVID are couched within the Gen Z and Millennial generations. And these generations were (generally speaking) indoctrinated into socialism and entitlement. Certainly there are hard working millennials and Gen Z'ers...somewhere...I think...but the larger point is with COVID prompting a proto-and-effective UBI economy, you paid an entire society of Americans to sit on their ass. Furthermore, you paid them to sit on their ass for so long, their mental and economic behaviors have changed permanently. And when you throw in the fact you lied to these generations about the importance of a college degree, saddling them with crippling levels of debt, they have dropped out of the labor force, in spite of restaurants and other employers offering $16/hour and $1,000 hiring bonuses.
Third, as a consequence of that, there is a labor shortage everywhere. Boomers are FINALLY retiring, Gen X'ers are getting sucked up into leadership/power vacuums. But there are no frontline troops/workers to do the actual work. Tradesmen are scarce and those that exist are overpaid and generally shitty. You can't find truck drivers to unload all the stuff we import from China. Engineers, doctors, and other skilled employees are in desperately short supply. You can't even find wait staff to show up on time and do their job right.
Fourth, all of this is couched in a woke marxist work environment where employers sole marketing strategy is to pander to the only value Gen Z, Millennial, and Gen X'ers' have - socialist politics. And that means not only burdening, but also insulting your work force with mandatory diversity, inclusion, sensitivity, etc., bullshit type of "training," making your already-intolerable job, even less tolerable.
Finally, to "earn" a position within the "prestigious" ranks of American employment, you unnecessarily force young people to get a "Bachelors required/Masters preferred." This is 17 to 19 years of schooling to get a job wherein the VAST VAST majority of time you could have trained a high school graduate in 2 weeks to do that job - NOT force them into 4-6 years of unnecessarily and costly schooling just so a brigade of psychopathic HR cunts could more easily sort through resumes.
And so now when Joe Biden tyrannically "decreed" employers must force employees to be vaccinated, that was not the straw that broke the camel's back, but the log. It was the flame necessary to ignite the Going-Galt-Explosion that you've seen these past few weeks. It was the final and missing piece of this Galtian Perfect Storm. And you my fine productive member of society have not, and will not, have a better time to go Galt.
First, a significant percent of other productive members of society are calling it quits. It's OK if the generations of liberal arts majors and social science majors call it quits. They were never producing anything anyway. And truthfully, the world will go without restaurants, movie theaters, or non-profits. But basic and critical people have had enough. Truck drivers are in short supply. Linemen and electricians as well. Accountants are in short supply. Factory and union workers are going on strike. And so are pilots and nurses. It's one thing if ONE sector or group of employees go on strike. But the US has not seen a universal strike of competent and productive people go on strike at the same time.
If you want to make the marxists, leftists, liberals, democrats, or even your employer feel the pinch, NOW is the time to go on strike while everybody else is.
Second, you get paid not to work.
Be it Uncle Joe's welfare state, the unemployment check you can collect from getting fired, or (more commonly) people scaling back, needing less out of fear and uncertainty, never has there been a better funded or stronger welfare net for you to go Galt on. This net is only further reinforced by America's world's reserve currency wherein we can print off more money (as the world prints off even more) and we can effectively still import all goods we need to survive (at least for a short period of time anyway). You won't be able to afford that new F-150 (which you can't because there are no computer chips), but you aren't going to starve either.
Third, fuck your employer.
Employers were already a bag of shit to begin with. Even before all the woke, diversity, racist, sexist, political bullshit, mere office politics already rendered most work environments unacceptable. But you throw in the psychopathic religion of politics via marketing, hiring, firing, promotions, and bullshit training (diversity, gender, environmentalism, etc.) get that shit out of here. To this day I do not know how whites or males don't walk off the job or tell their bosses to fuck off when they are actively discriminated against, promoted over, or accused of bigotry by their employer. And while I know most of you are saddled with debt and that's why you must accept this insulting and disgusting treatment by your employers, in the before time, real Americans would not tolerate this shitty treatment. They would walk. And if there was a time for Americans to walk (perhaps sue your employers) now is the time when that "mandatory diversity training" comes in.
And finally, society needs you more than you need society.
Whether employers realize it or not, and whether socialists/democrats realize it or not, they are completely dependent upon the real and productive members of society. The MBA-laden cunt in the HR department does not do ANYTHING. She does not manufacture tires, deliver gas, or even clean the windows. She is bureaucratic, overhead, worthless fat. The same can be said for the millions of professors, teachers, non-profits, and other nanny-nazi busy bodies lecturing the rest of society how to live and how they own them more tax money. That's nice Tanner the Sociology Professor thinks Steve the mechanic should work more and pay more in taxes. If Steve quits fixing cars, society is fucked. Tanner could literally kill himself and society wouldn't skip a beat. And as I said before, there has never been a time where more productive members of society are calling it quits. If you want to go Galt and make it count, NOW is the time, especially while there's a democrat president in office.
And so in understanding this economic/political/sociological perfect storm that has arrived, every productive member of society should have a list of demands from any potential employer, today and into the future. A modern day "worker bill of rights" that will drastically improve working conditions, drastically increase production, but make sure you are never insulted, abused, or enslaved like you've been the past 20 years.
1. The elimination of college education when not necessary, and a reintroduction of training programs.
2. The elimination of all political training and a return to meritocracy (as much as that was accomplished anyway beforehand)
3. The elimination of commutes unless absolutely necessary.
4. The inability to fire anyone based on their personal lives whether that is medical choices, gender, politics, sexual relations, social media, etc.
5. The work gets done, I can go home. I do not sit and look busy at my desk because I'm better and faster than everyone else.
It's not a terribly extensive bill of rights, nor is it one that any employer is going to sign in a contractual sense. But it is a group of standards every productive member of society must hold employers up to before exchanging their labor. And if every producer in this society just decides to take a vacation, and deprive employers and society of our skills, competency, reliability, and production, it will become very clear who is most important in this society and who, precisely, will be dictating the terms going forth.
And as always, remember to enjoy the decline.
______________________________________
While you're on vacation telling your boss and society to fuck off, consider purchasing the book below!
Inner Cappy successfully channeled
ReplyDeleteLike Going Your Own Way?
ReplyDeleteEven back in the 80s this was a problem (I experienced this myself when in 1984 I wanted a weekend off so I could go visit a famous zen master i.e. Philip Kapleau) that is, if I tell you ahead of time (in the case of Philip Kapleau I told them two months ahead of time) that I want a certain weekend off (or other time off that I legitimately have according to the contract) you DO NOT ask me to do overtime or extra work during that time. No telling me on Thursday before that weekend "Well, we have extra work so can you come in on Saturday?"
ReplyDeleteTo sort of reiterate what you said, it should also be none of the employer's business whether or not I want to go talk to Philip Kapleau. That should be my own private matter.
To give you an idea though of how work even back in the 1980s sucked, where I worked at (Eaton Corporation) in the early 1980s, they didn't want to pay for health insurance (as well as the extra paperwork required by the government) for their employees. So what they would do, is hire you for 6 months then lay you off for six months, then hire you again for six months, etc. This was because if they had you on for more than six months, they would have to pay for health insurance (as well as other things). This was before they realized they could get around this problem by going through a temp agency (such as Manpower). Thus the trend in the mid to late 80s was that Manpower became the biggest employer at that time (they called such jobs "McJobs").
i'm there. my employer, vmi, came out early with the vax mandate. i bailed. looking at new jobs, its crazy. used to be minimum wage jobs were one dimensional. now they want computer skills, management, human resource knowledge, cpr/emt training, etc etc etc all for minimum wage pay with less than 30 hours to comply w/ obama's "full time" benefits law. i can do all that, but i won't for minimum wage. if you're going to pay burger flippers 15 bucks, you better pony up for the multitasking or break the job into pieces and hire several minimum wagers. thirty years in .mil, pension won't pay the taxes. going cash only.
ReplyDeleteThe corporate media is doing backflips to hide the general strike. Mostly they blame the Covid varian de jour. Never the real causes. Screw them all. Nothing would be sweeter than to see a legion of HR commissars out on their useless fat behinds.
ReplyDeleteThe US is, or has become, a strange place. The left constantly complains about how racist, unfair, misogynist, etc everything is, while at the same time holding that the US is better than everywhere else. You don’t see leftists heading for greener pastures abroad, or only rarely. The left also is proud of being so open minded, and they are, as long as you agree with them about everything. If not, they want to send you to re-education camps.
ReplyDeleteThere just isn’t a lot of upside in behaving yourself and being productive and doing what you are told. If you’re married and have kids, ok, you have to do those things. But why bother if you don’t have to? You’d be surprised how cheap and low stress it is to live abroad, outside of Western Europe and Canada and a few other places. People in the US are forced to gamble in the stock market in order to retire, since it’s expensive to live there. The market crashes and burns every so often, infrequently enough to attract a new crop of suckers who think it only goes up.
The world would probably be a better place if more people learned to relax and respond to the signs around them. The signs are telling you that, if you are hard working and productive and responsible, every bad thing is your fault, at least in the US. You are responsible for things that happened 150 years before you were born.
I say to hell with that, vote with your feet to somewhere sane. The rest of the world isn’t like that. Don’t waste your life trying to please people who will always hate you.
A lot of people are afraid of Going Galt because of muh health insurance and muh 401k. They think they will be instantly bankrupted if they go without health insurance, and if they stay in the US they could be right. I recently spent 2 nights in the hospital (private room) in a private hospital and also had an endoscopy of my esophagus. Total cost $800. The catch is that it wasn’t in the US. In the US with insurance I would have been out at least $5000 (that was my deductible ). Without insurance it would have been $10,000-15,000.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of muh 401k you are basically trapped in the 401k system for the rest of your life, before you retire and after you retire. You can’t take that 401k money and buy a beach hotel in Malaysia or start a burger stand in Mexico. You could take the money out, but the penalties are so high that it’s almost prohibitive.
Muh health insurance and muh 401k are really just a ball and chain to keep you in the corporate rat race.
not gonna work
ReplyDeletethe companies are too big to fail
your following is limited, thus unlikely to cause a major effect.(assuming those who read the blog actually follow what you say)
there's a paradigm shift occurring. that is, most of the people either agree with the woke religion, or shut up because they fear the mob. most of the institutions agree with the narrative. it is not likely that they will change. so even if most of the productive workforce go galt, they will rationalize it as the fault of white supremacy/capitalism. It will only lead to another revolution.so going galt might actually catalyse the revolution thus bringing more harm
This is a trend, it doesn't need to be an organized movement. I got laid off 2 years ago and have found my options are all gig work. No one wants to hire at >30 hours a week, no one wants to provide benefits. My wife works in HR and hates it now between the SJW nonsense and the endless stream of new government regulations. It used to be she could help employees with health insurance or other issues and questions. Not it is all self-serve on the web and the employees need to be smart enough to figure it out on their own.
ReplyDeleteWe have the death of competence. Have you noticed you can't get competent help? Look at minimum wage in 1985 and use a CPI calculator to figure out what that equates to today. Now what if the CPI is off by 1% (or more). Bottom line is many people have to face the choice of working 2 minimum wage (in 1985) jobs at 60 hours a week to make ends meet, get no insurance or benefits, and have both employers trying to schedule over one another because needs changed from when the person was hired. I applied for a job where I had demonstrated expertise in 3 areas and they still only wanted to offer <$10/hr and <30 hours per week.
Capitalism is better than other systems because it has more checks and balances, but when the system breaks down it is as bad as any other system. We are out of balance and breaking down. Everything is financialized and the beginning worker, hell most workers, face an array of bad choices. Competence requires people to stick around. Now you have high turnover by a workforce that knows they are getting screwed. You aren't going to get people to care in that environment.
We are surprised when people find not working is better than working in a hostile environment for minimum wage or close?