its a interesting thought.. Thing is, the world was working on shutting off its own engine. As that is and would always be the result of a broken morality. In the past it took a long time for the process to work, and was also limited by the fact that people were allowed to be "immoral" ( under a broken system of morality ) since those same "immoral" people were needed to keep things afloat.. So, what the strikers did was remove strategic members of the "immoral" group by teaching them that they were in fact moral and then showing them howto fight back. After that things were pretty much destined for collapse. So while at first they were intentionally speeding the inevitable collapse after a point they were no longer the drivers of the collapse and instead saving those worthy of saving from what was happening.. They were not destroyers, they were enablers.. Sometimes they enabled people to save themselves..

If you read Galt's Speech in the book - in fact, if you read the book - you will see that this producer's strike was known many times, perhaps for most of human history. Only this time, it was explicit. Absent John Galt, the effects would have been the same, only not as dramatic, but more protracted.

See the discussion here in The Gulch
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/14...

It is possible that in imperial Rome, one man had discovered aluminum, but his gift to Caesar only got him killed. In ancient Rome, conquest was honored, business was not. Successful businessmen retired to farms and let their slaves and freedmen run the enterprises. It was only 1000 years later that merchant families were known.

Government intrusion and control caused John Galt to not share his wisdom and productivity with the world so it was the failing country that cause him to share with only those in the gulch. At least that was my take on AS. And to me there may be thousands of John Galt's in the world today. Creative, intelligent people that have been stifled into not living up to there abilities because the cost is too high.