"The rich are on strike" - Romney and his allies say the economy will come back if he wins

[alcibiades_mystery]

24. The funny thing is that this argument completely invalidates all of capitalist market economics

If the rich or "producer class" were "on strike," it would open up a huge hole in the market that anybody could jump in to, and, according to invisible hand economics, people (as rational actors) inevitably would. This is the basis for all of market / competition theory, and it's the only part of the theory that would guarantee something like the social mobility so promised by capitalist ideologues. If the withdrawal of producers from (already existing!) markets doesn't immediately result in new producers entering that market, then none of capitalist economics makes any sense at all.

It's a really weird survival of feudalism that even sustains this odd "Go Galt" argument, a sense in the inherent superiority of some over others. Notice that this inherent superiority is in fact the opposite of capitalism - it is what the capitalists or emerging bourgeois class fought the feudalists over for 300 years. For the capitalists, superiority is not inherent, but specifically temporary and determined precisely through market competition. That "Going Galt" would actually be a feudalist argument is, of course, not that surprising, since its inventor was essentially a Tsarist.