bounty44
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quote:
ORIGINAL: thompsonx
Except the truth is otherwise. The truth is that the ignorant lying slut that started the movement tried to fraudulently use the social security system she sought to destroy.
What libertarians want is to have the freedom to phoque over the weak and the ignorant.
one more for now troll.
exactly how was ayn rand an "ignorant lying slut?"
you cant answer it--does that qualify as "disabusing you of your ignorance?"
also, "tried to fraudulently use the social security system?"
she was an American citizen who worked here and paid into the system. exactly where is the fraud?
if you are---and it wouldn't be a surprise if you were---trying to say that "fraud" existed because of your failure to understand her position, here is some good reading for you:
quote:
Did Ayn Rand Receive Social Security Benefits?
The "Atlas Shrugged" author called government handouts "immoral," but there is evidence that she accepted Social Security benefits in her later years — and that it was consistent with her worldview to do so...
An archivist for the Ayn Rand Institute told us that although most of Rand’s financial records were destroyed at the time of her death and they have no physical evidence of her receiving Social Security distributions, Evva Pryor’s testimony was backed up by Rand’s secretary, Cynthia Peikoff, who helped the author with her finances during the last two years of her life and reported seeing Social Security checks.
The archivist also told us that proof that Rand paid into the Social Security system earlier in life exists in the form of an application for a Social Security card, the card itself, and legal correspondence from the mid-1940s inquiring about a refund of Social Security withholdings.
In 2010, freelance writer Patia Stephens reported obtaining a Social Security Administration record via FOIA request showing that Ayn Rand collected a total of $11,002 in Social Security payments between 1974 and her death in 1982 (her husband, Frank O’Connor, also collected benefits until his death)...
Yet the accusation of hypocrisy rests on an assumption that nowhere in Rand’s vast oeuvre had she ever made a case for accepting money from the government. However, she did, in fact, make such a case in a 1966 essay, “The Question of Scholarships.”
It is morally defensible for those who decry publicly-funded scholarships, Social Security benefits, and unemployment insurance to turn around and accept them, Rand argued, because the government had taken money from them by force (via taxes). There’s only one catch: the recipient must regard the receipt of said benefits as restitution, not a social entitlement...
quote:
Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others — the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it.
Ayn Rand Institute Chief Content Officer Onkar Ghate addressed the apparent paradox of Rand’s position in a 2014 article, “The Myth About Ayn Rand and Social Security”:
quote:
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.
Social Security is not voluntary. Your participation is forced through payroll taxes, with no choice to opt out even if you think the program harmful to your interests. If you consider such forced “participation” unjust, as Rand does, the harm inflicted on you would only be compounded if your announcement of the program’s injustice precludes you from collecting Social Security.
This being said, your moral integrity does require that you view the funds only as (partial) restitution for all that has been taken from you by such welfare schemes and that you continue, sincerely, to oppose the welfare state.
The flaw in this argument is that it only adds up if you accept Rand’s characterization of involuntary taxation as “legalized plunder” and her assertion that it confers upon those who object to it on principle (and, by some interpretations, only those who object to it on principle) the right to financial restitution.
Flawed or not, however, the fact that she articulated the position puts paid to the charge that her acceptance of Social Security benefits in later life was hypocritical. On her own terms, it was not.
http://www.snopes.com/ayn-rand-social-security/
ah, yet again another "thank you for disabusing you of your ignorance."
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