Dear Messiah. Cory the Well Driller here.

Excerpts from an American businessman’s letter to the ObaMessiah, which is a morality tale for our times:

    Given the uproar about the simple question asked you by Joe the plumber, and the persecution that has been heaped on him because he dared to question you, I find myself motivated to say a few things to you myself. . .  Let me introduce myself. You can call me "Cory the Well Driller". I am a 54 year old high school graduate. . . I started my own water well drilling business at a time when the economy here in East Texas was in a tailspin from the crash of the early 80's oil boom. I didn't get any help from the government, nor did I look for any. . .
    2 years after that, I made another business loan, this time for $250,000.00, to buy another used drilling rig and all the support equipment needed to run another, larger, drill rig. This provided another 2 full time jobs for East Texans. Again, I spent a couple of years not knowing if I had made a smart move, or a move that would bankrupt me. For the third time in 13 years, I had placed everything I owned on the line, risking everything, in order to build a business. . .
   No government programs were there to help me, Mr. Obama, but that's okay, I didn't expect any, nor did I want any. I was too busy fighting to make success happen to sit around waiting for the government to help me.
    [After many years of stress and hard work developing the reputation for being the most competent and most honest water well driller and mud pump manufacturer in East Texas -- I do have a stent in my heart now to memorialize it all --] my combined businesses now employ 32 full time employees, and distribute $5,000,000.00 annually through the local economy.
    Now, just 4 months ago I borrowed $1,254,000.00, purchasing computer controlled machining equipment to start my 4th business, a production machine shop. The machine shop will serve the mud pump company so that we can better manufacture our pumps that are being shipped worldwide. Of course, the machine shop will also do work for outside companies as well. This has already produced 2 more full time jobs, and 2 more should develop out of it in the next few months.
    This should work out, but if it doesn't it will be because you, and the other professional politicians like yourself, will have destroyed our country’s (and the world’s) economy with your meddling with mortgage loan programs through your liberal manipulation and intimidation of loaning institutions to make sure that unqualified borrowers could get mortgages.
    You see, at the very time when I couldn't get a business loan to get my mud pumps into production, you were working with ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act programs to make sure that unqualified borrowers could buy homes with no down payment, and even no credit or worse yet, bad credit. Even the infamous, liberal, Ninja loans (No Income, No Job or Assets). While these unqualified borrowers were enjoying unrealistically low interest rates, I was paying 22% to 24% interest on the credit cards that I had used to provide me the funds for the mud pump business that has created jobs for more East Texans.
    It's funny, because after 25 years of turning almost every dime of extra money back into my businesses to grow them, it has been only in the last two years that I have finally made enough money to be able to put a little away for retirement, and now the value of that has dropped 40% because of the policies you and your ilk have perpetrated on our country.
    You see, Mr. Obama, I'm the guy you intend to raise taxes on. I'm the guy who has spent 25 years toiling and sweating, fretting and fighting, stressing and risking, to build a business and get ahead. I'm the guy who has been on the very edge of bankruptcy more than a dozen times over the last 25 years, and all the while creating more and more jobs for East Texans who didn't want to take a risk, and would not demand from themselves what I have demanded from myself. I'm the guy you characterize as "the Americans who can afford it the most" that you believe should be taxed more to provide income redistribution "to spread the wealth" to those who have never toiled, sweated, fretted, fought, stressed, or risked anything. You want to characterize me as someone who has enjoyed a life of privilege and who needs to pay a higher percentage of my income than those who have bought into your entitlement culture.
    I resent you, Mr. Obama, as I resent all who want to use class warfare as a tool to advance their political career. What's worse, each year more Americans buy into your liberal entitlement culture, and turn to the government for their hope of a better life instead of themselves. Liberals are succeeding through more than 40 years of collaborative effort between the predominant liberal media, and liberal indoctrination programs in the public school systems across our land.
    Here is what is so terribly sad about this. America was made great by people who embraced the one-time American culture of self reliance, self motivation, self determination, self discipline, personal betterment, hard work, risk taking. A culture built around the concept that success was in reach of every able bodied American who would strive for it. Each year that fewer Americans embrace that culture, we all descend together. We descend down the socialist path that has brought country after country ultimately to bitter and unremarkable states. If you and your liberal comrades in the media and school systems would spend half as much effort cultivating a culture of can-do across America as you do cultivating your entitlement culture, we could see Americans at large embracing the conviction that they can elevate themselves through personal betterment, personal achievement, and self reliance. You see, when people embrace such ideals, they act on them. When people act on such ideals, they succeed. All of America could find herself elevating instead of deteriorating. But that would eliminate the need for liberal politicians, wouldn't it, Mr. Obama? The country would not need you if the country was convinced that problem solving was best left with individuals instead of the government. You and all your liberal comrades have got a vested interested in creating a dependent class in our country. It is the very business of liberals to create an ever expanding dependence on government. What's remarkable is that you, who have never produced a job in your life, are going to tax me to take more of my money and give it to people who wouldn't need my money if they would get off their entitlement mentality asses and apply themselves at work, demand more from themselves, and quit looking to liberal politicians to raise their station in life. . .
    In short, Mr. Obama, your political philosophies represent everything that is wrong with our country. You represent the culture of government dependence instead of self reliance; Entitlement mentality instead of personal achievement; Penalization of the successful to reward the unmotivated; Political correctness instead of open mindedness and open debate. If you are successful, you may preside over the final transformation of America from being the greatest and most self-reliant culture on earth, to just another country of whiners and wimps, who sit around looking to the government to solve their problems. Like all of western Europe. All countries on the decline. All countries that, because of liberal socialistic mentalities, have a little less to offer mankind every year.
    God help us…

Ayn Rand once identified who in fact are America’s most persecuted minority: her businessmen.  That was in 1962, about the time when this chap was starting school.  Those persecuted businessmen are beginning to understand this for themselves, and this means more trouble than you might imagine for the world’s political Messiahs.

You see, at the root of the prevailing “liberal” philosophy -- of which the political success of Mr Obama is the fag end -- is the assumption that when politicians “go to the well” to pay for their promises, there will always be businessmen like Cory the Well Driller and Joe the Plumber there to pay for them.

The healthiest political development in years is that Cory and Joe are starting to understand that for themselves – that they have the right to live, work and produce for their own sakes, not just as the milch cows for millions of politically chosen others.

This is the real point behind the Ayn Rand Renaissance in recent months, and the reason Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged has been topping book sales lists again fifty years after it first appeared.  Because, as Yaron Brook says,

“Atlas Shrugged” provides a way out: it provides a defense of the individual’s moral right to pursue his own happiness, which is the precondition for upholding the individual’s political right to pursue his own happiness.

Greg Salmieri makes the point plainer:

Most of the recent discussion of Atlas has focused on its political themes, creating the impression that the novel is essentially a condemnation of government intervention in the economy. However, its scope, its relevance to the current crisis, and the reasons for [both its enduring appeal and the hostility of the liberal mainstream] go much wider and much deeper than this. Galt goes on strike not simply against high taxes and unjust regulations, but against the morality of altruism, which Rand identifies as the cause of such measures, and against the world-view of which this moral code is an expression-a philosophy that denies the efficacy of reason and the absolutism of reality.

No wonder liberals got so nasty about the Tea Party phenomenon.  They know, even if Cory the Well Driller and Joe the Plumber don’t quite know it yet themselves, that once the producers realise all this for themselves – that they have the moral right to live, work and pursue their own happiness for their own sake – that the jig is up.