Who is John Galt?

Paul Brodsky & Lee Quaintance run QB Partners, a private macro-oriented investment fund based in New York.

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"Who is John Galt?

In 1966, Alan Greenspan wrote an essay called “Gold and Economic Freedom” and concluded it with the following summary (the entire piece may be found at the end of this letter):

“Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold (Ed. – as was done in April 1933). If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves..."

Weiter unter:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/10/who-is-john-galt/