*Please be sure to read the fine print.
1. Ayn Rand took Social Security.
2. She knew that was criminal.
3. As with her adultery, she invented an elaborate rationale why wrong was special-snowflake-right in her case: Despoiling young people is predation, except when they’re being despoiled in an act of restitution unknown to anyone but Ayn Rand.
This is disgusting:
Precisely because Rand views welfare programs like Social Security as legalized plunder, she thinks the only condition under which it is moral to collect Social Security is if one “regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism” (emphasis hers). The seeming contradiction that only the opponent of Social Security has the moral right to collect it dissolves, she argues, once you recognize the crucial difference between the voluntary and the coerced.
Money stolen from you is no longer yours. You failed to defend your property. Stealing an allegedly equal amount from an uninvolved innocent is not justice but simply more crime.
Moreover: How is this not asking “another man to live for” her sake?
From Man Alive:
The paths to error are infinite, but two landmarks I have learned to rely on, in listening to people trying to justify their evil actions, are the logical fallacies Tu Quoque and Two Wrongs Make A Right. Tu Quoque is Latin. It means, “You do it, too.” When you catch your teenager swiping a beer, the pre-fabricated rationale will surely be, “Well, you drink, why can’t I?!?” And you were probably very young when you first heard some little proto-brute justifying his vengeance by bellowing, “Well, he hit me first!” – ergo, two wrongs make a right. You should probably be on your guard against any statement that starts with a “well” and ends with an exclamation point. That particular verbal construction seems to fit very comfortably in the mouths of liars and thugs. But when you hear those two logical fallacies being deployed in tandem, what you are hearing, almost certainly, is a cunningly-crafted rationalization of an abominable injustice.
Rand’s apologist has done nothing but make this matter worse.
Here’s the right way to handle this: “When she was very old, Ayn Rand made mistakes. Old people do that.”
Her slavish followers live and die on the myth of Rand’s infallibility, but surely this explanation is preferable than to insist that she had schemed all along to mulct her neighbors.
There is no justification for Ayn Rand’s late-life parasitism. Her defenders call their own probity into question by trying to rationalize this undoubted predation.
