Perhaps at that point she realized that her ideas were shit, and a system where you contribute to a public safety net is not a bad idea, it's what society is for.
Or perhaps she was still a dense prick to the end of her days. Who knows?
1. I’m not an objectivist.
2. Looks like the comment I replied to is heavily downvoted and soon to be flagged. Seems like I’m not the only one that agrees that it doesn’t contribute. I expect a similar thing to happen to yours shortly as well.
> She paid into the system. Why shouldn’t she get as much value out of it as possible?
That's not how “the system” works though. She paid so other people could benefit from it, then when she benefited it, she became part of a scheme that took money from working people to give it to her: she become one of the parasites she hated in good years.
I don't blame her for preferring hypocrisy to suicide, but it's still fair to call her hypocrisy for what it is.
Except she isn't stealing the state in any way, the state is more than willing to give her back.
If she's stealing someone, it's someone akin to her younger self whose work is taken away by the state to give her.
Had she become a burglar, stealing directly from the senior public servants[1] houses, then it would have been somehow consistent. But I'm pretty sure she would still have agreed that this was theft and immoral.
The reality is simple, at the end of her life, she simply couldn't afford to live in a way that matched her individualist ideology.
[1]: because even though Rand claims she hates the State, it's pretty clear from the writing that her main personal issues are the civil servants themselves.
I never claimed she was stealing the state, I claimed that she was stealing from the state.
> If she's stealing someone, it's someone akin to her younger self whose work is taken away by the state to give her.
I didn’t claim she was stealing anyone.
The state took her money, and she reclaimed some of it. This is perfectly consistent with her moral philosophy and doesn’t constitute hypocrisy in any way.
> I never claimed she was stealing the state, I claimed that she was stealing from the state.
Not a native speaker, what's the difference between those two?
> I didn’t claim she was stealing anyone.
Wait you did, right above “I claimed that she was stealing from the state”.
> The state took her money, and she reclaimed some of it.
No, in reality the state redistributed her money, then the state handed other people's money to her.
> This is perfectly consistent with her moral philosophy and doesn’t constitute hypocrisy in any way.
You keep saying that but you've failed to make a convincing argument.
How would accepting stolen money handed over by your nemesis be consistent with anything?
If we consider the state stole her money earlier, then the state is again stealing someone's money by the time it gives it to her. If taxes are theft, then late Ayn Rand was in “Possession of property obtained by crime”, which isn't morally more defensible than the theft itself.
This comment doesn’t make any point that I haven’t already addressed in my reply to the parent comment. I’d recommend reading it a little more carefully before downvoting.
The hypocrisy lies in the fact that the philosophy of Ayn Rand - that an elite few held up society and the rest were pretty much just parasites - has been used at great length to justify the gutting of social programs.
Please read my comment in good faith.
There is no contradiction with Rand’s philosophy here.
According to her framework, the state stole from her throughout her life. Using public assistance is merely retrieving a small piece of that stolen money.
I agree that it was in her philosophical framework to accept social security - apologies if my comment seemed in bad faith due to that not being clearer. The irony does not lie with her, but rather those that use her philosophy to eliminate the safety net that she herself ended up using.
Sure, she could have used the money she had put into social security to invest, and maybe would have come out better off. But for those of us who see how public services can enrich an entire society, there is irony to how this all played out.
"The irony is with those who believe that thievery is wrong. She obviously didn't believe what she wrote because her actions reveal she believed in stealing your stolen property back from a thief, which is itself thievery."
"The irony is with those who believe that thievery is wrong. She obviously didn't believe what she wrote because her actions reveal she was OK accepting when the thieve gave her your property to make up for the theft she suffered earlier"
FTFY.
She didn't steal from the thieve, she became complicit with the thieve stealing other people's work to get their money back (gracefully handed by the thieve).
She believed that even wealthy kids that just live off their trust funds were parasites too. It was about consuming vs producing, not elite vs non-elite.
There’s no hypocrisy there. She paid into the system. Why shouldn’t she get as much value out of it as possible?