Men on Strike: The Atlas Society Asks Dr. Helen Smith

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 193rd episode of The Atlas Society Asks where she interviews Dr. Helen Smith about her 2014 book "Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why it Matters."

Dr. Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist and wife of Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds unleashed a firestorm of controversy with a pointed 2008 column popularizing the slogan “Going Galt,” a reference to Atlas Shrugged and a provocative proposal: “Should productive people cut back on what they need, make less money, and take it easy so that the government is starved for funds, or is there some other way of making a statement?”

Smith continued the theme of withdrawal with her pivotal book Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream—and Why It Matters, which argues that “men aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers. In addition, men are going on strike, either consciously or unconsciously, because they do not want to be injured by the myriad of laws, attitudes and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the twenty-first century.”