RUSH: Mike in North Carolina, I’m glad you called. Open Line Friday. Your turn, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Well, Rush, I gotta tell you what an honor it is to talk to you today.

RUSH: Thank you. I appreciate that, sir.

CALLER: I have been a student of the Limbaugh Institute for just about ten years, and I gotta tell you, I have a question for you today that I hope will demonstrate that I have indeed been paying attention. And the question is, what would our society look like if the 99%-ers, mostly, if the 1%-ers just quit? Just decided that they had enough and they cashed in their chips, pulled their shutters, shingled their shops —

RUSH: Would you like to read a book about this?

CALLER: Well, sure.

RUSH: There’s a book called Atlas Shrugged. It’s a long book. Have you heard of it?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: It’s by Ayn Rand, and it’s about this very thing. It’s about the producers throwing up their hands in frustration and just saying, “To heck with it. I’m not doing this anymore. I am not gonna pay these exorbitant tax rates. I’m not gonna be one of the few in this country productive and everybody feeds off me,” and they just quit. It is a very, very long book. A movie was made of it within the past year, which, by the way, I’m sure you could rent that DVD somewhere.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: I have seen the movie. It’s okay. It will entertain you. It’ll make the point. Reading the book is a commitment because it’s very long. The thing is, this is starting to happen. Not in any kind of a mass way, but, for example, Eduardo Saverin, who is renouncing his citizenship and staying in Singapore rather than paying capital gains taxes on the financial gain he’s realizing today with the Facebook IPO. It’s gonna turn him into a billionaire, not just a paper billionaire, he’s actually gonna have the assets now, and he doesn’t want to pay the capital gains taxes on it, which will be something in the neighborhood of $60 million. There are a bunch of American corporations that are already locating offshore and doing most of their business offshore and keeping their money offshore.

This led to a New York Times story on Apple, about how mean and unpatriotic Apple is. They found the guy who runs a community college right next door in Cupertino, California, and this guy said that his school is running a deficit because Apple isn’t paying enough taxes. His school is in debt, might have to cut some classes, might have to let some teachers go because Apple isn’t paying enough taxes. But then he took the criticism away. “Whatever they do, I don’t want to make them mad.” But it’s not happening in any mass way. But if it did, it’s over.