First of all, I'll let Stephen Colbert have his say. 

 I believe it was Charles de Gaulle who said that graveyards were full of indispensable men. Having read Atlas Shrugged (well, most of it--I made it all the way till about halfway through John Galt's interminable monologue at the end), I have several problems with Rand's philosophy. The first is that she makes the same mistake that Karl Marx makes, but on the opposite end of the spectrum. Whereas Marx sees all capitalists as ruthless exploiters of labor, Rand seems to see everyone who does not prosper as lazy and wanting to sponge off the successful. 

The bigger fallacy, however, is that society would just fall apart if innovators or entrepreneurs just went off on their own and created their own little world. Suppose, back in the 1920s or '30s, Henry Ford and his counterparts at GM and Chrysler had decided to "go Galt." Would the U.S. have collapsed at the sudden disappearance of its three biggest automobile titans? No, more likely we would still have a "Big Three," but they might include Hudson, Nash and Studebaker, or we might be looking forward to the latest innovations from Tucker or Willys. Atlas may have shrugged, but there will always be others to take his place--as indeed, Hercules did briefly in Greek myth. 

My other, bigger problem is that the people crying loudest about "going Galt" aren't actually producing anything. In Rand's novel, at least, characters like Hank Reardon and Dagney Taggert actually headed businesses which contributed to the economy. Victoria Jackson (Victoria Jackson!) whines that she's being punished for her success, when a quick scan of the Internet Movie Database shows that co-starring with "Weird Al" Yankovic and a small part in I Love You to Death are arguably the highlights of her post-SNL  career. Go Galt, Victoria? Go ahead.

The financiers who created the instruments less substantive than cotton candy are welcomed to join her, along with the hidebound execs who have stifled innovation at once-great manufacturing companies (not to mention their enablers in the halls of government). Honestly, would you miss these folks if they were gone?

In conducting this little thought experiment, the result is less Atlas Shrugged and more The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.  Readers of the latter will recall that, toward the end of the book, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect find themselves on the "B" Ark of the planet Golgafrincham. Claiming an imminent planetary apocalypse, the Golgafrinchans rid themselves of the useless third of their population. 

So if these people want to have their own little Objectivist paradise somewhere away from the rest of us, let 'em do it. I think we'll get along just fine, and we might even get some fresh new ideas from those who rise to take their place.

Want to go Galt? Go ahead!