Who indeed?

Who is John Galt?
I've been thinking about that classic question, from the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged quite a bit lately.
In the book, Galt is a super capitalist genius, a Gulliver sort of hero who is being tied down by small-minded parasites who want to redistribute his wealth for the public good. Contemporary conservatives started talking about this fictional hero shortly after the last election, and there was a lot written about how all the talented "John Galts" of the country would be tempted to just quit--go on strike--if they were going to be taxed and regulated.
Then how would people who were not captains of industry--all those mere employees--get along? Ha ha. They'd be barely able to feed and dress themselves.
Every so often, you'd see a sticker "Who is John Galt?" And there were plenty of people who would suggest that, of course, it is the nation's richest one percent, because obviously they have all the brains. No one had better tick them off, or we'd be in big trouble.
Because it will take a lot of creativity to get us out of the mess we're in.
So I've been thinking. Where are the creative ideas? As far as I see, this creme de la creme is not being tied down. They still have their jobs and incomes. No one's stopping them. Yet here we stay, in the same fix as ever.
I bring it up because of a piece in the New Yorker about the Koch brothers, whose Wichita company Koch Industries is one of the richest in the nation. (If you haven't already, drop what you're doing and read it here.)
If ever there were John Galt characters, it would be David and Charles Koch, who built up the family business inherited from their father, and now use their billions to thwart any attempt at business regulation.
But if you look a little deeper at the family itself, as portrayed in this article, it also says something about the state of creativity in this country.
Fred Koch, the family patriarch, started things pretty much from scratch. He was a chemical engineering graduate from MIT who invented a more efficient way to convert oil into gasoline, and the company was built around this invention.
The company was successful, but when his sons took it over, they boosted it into the stratosphere.
Note here, that the father was the one with the bright idea. He actually created something--a tangible product for sale. His sons have no inventions to their names, however. All their mental genius has been directed at business deals and at rebuffing attempts to regulate them.
In a way, I think that's why we're in all this trouble as a country. We're too many generations away from the inventors. They've never been hungry. They've never felt the sting of being rejected by a higher authority (Fred Koch's invention was not accepted by American oil companies. He had to get his start working with Joseph Stalin in the USSR.) All that one percent have done is create money--for themselves mostly.
This is why we're not seeing the expected answers to our problems. This top one percent have grown too soft and complacent.
It's too bad, because at the same time, we're also worrying about a "crisis in creativity," as written about in a recent Newsweek.
So the question begs to be answered. Who is John Galt?
Maybe it's us.