David McElroy

Is there anybody who hasn’t felt the need at some point to get away from the insane world and escape to a place of relative sanity? I feel it a lot, and I’ve been feeling it more strongly again recently. It’s occurred to me that I don’t really need Galt’s Gulch right now. I need to find my own version of Hugh Akston’s diner.

If you’re a fan of “Atlas Shrugged,” you know what the two represent. Galt’s Gulch was a brand new society, cut off from the mainstream world — existing without outsiders’ knowledge. It had been founded to give the world’s productive people a place they could go to escape the “looters” who were taking their money and their ideas.

The diner that Dr. Hugh Akston ran, on the other hand, was a part of the mainstream world, in plain view of everyone. Akston had been a philosophy professor who found the world uninterested in his ideas, so he was forced to retreat from university teaching and run a small, remote diner in Colorado. The two places represented entirely different things. Galt’s Gulch was an entirely new free world. Akston’s diner was all about living honestly within the existing world until you could get to the new world.

I want to live in Galt’s Gulch. I want that new world to exist. I believe it’s possible, and I believe we’re going to build it. In the meantime, though, I have to live in the same old world that everybody else does. And if I’m going to remain sane, that requires finding my own version of Akston’s diner.

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If there’s one thing that most conservatives and libertarians agree on, it’s about the gospel of privatization. Both groups agree that everyone is better off when governments contract with private companies to perform services.

If you look at the Reason Foundation’s website, you can find all about the glories of privatization and why it’s better than having government employees perform the work.

You’ll see praise of privatizing public works, garbage collection, lotteries and airport screening, among others. I’m sure the facts of the reports and studies are accurate as far as they go, but they’re missing the most basic point, as far as I’m concerned.

If I am forced by a city or state to fork over the money to pay for paving roads or collecting trash or maintaining public parks, how much does it matter to me whether the employees who do the work are government employees or on the payroll of a company that I’m required to support, whether I like the work or not?

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been noticing horribly incompetent companies I deal with lately. That’s made me wonder why I should prefer dealing with one of them — if I didn’t have any choice in the matter — rather than government employees. Why is an incompetent private company with a monopoly any better than an incompetent government?

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Nothing points out the banality of news like missing a few days of it. After nearly a week away from news, I wondered if I’d missed anything that mattered to me. After looking around for a few days, I haven’t found anything yet that was worth paying attention to.

From the middle of last week until Monday of this week, I was preoccupied with other things and didn’t read any news. For most of that time, I was taking care of a dying cat. Even when I wasn’t directly dealing with her, I was concerned enough about her that I lost interest in following anything in the news.

Since Tuesday, I haven’t found anything that I missed by ignoring the news for five days or so.

Hundreds and hundreds of websites, TV channels and newspapers are devoted to keeping us up to date on the news. Surely some of what they publish must be vital to me. Right? Or is it just habit to keep paying attention to what they’re saying?

I missed the run-up to the birth of a royal baby. I missed various people in Washington yelling at each other for various things. I missed minute-by-minute coverage of a couple of high-profile political races in New York City. (Both of the races are in the news because of the past sexual escapades of candidates, not because of anything related to the issues in the races.)

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