...An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she secured Rand's Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O'Connor (husband Frank O'Connor).
That's right, the Queen Bee of rugged individualism slopped at the public trough along with the rest of us. She used Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Shrug at that, Atlas.
I always suspecteed she had a softer side! This made my day...
ReplyDeletewonderful! This is right up there with current pseudo-conservative federal legislators who want to eliminate SS and repeal health care reform (as paltry as that was) but keep all their OWN taxpayer-funded health care and retirement benefits.
ReplyDeleteI don't get the comment re: hypocricy...
ReplyDeleteSay you make $30,000 a year for a 45 year working life... The gvmt forces you, between you and your employer, to "invest" about $4,500 per year in your "retirement."
If you invested that yourself, at market rates, you would have well over a million when you retire, enought to continue taking out $30,000 per year and still leave a pile of dough for your heirs.
Instead, investing on your behalf, the gvmt. gives you $1,500 or so per month and then, when you die, keeps the profit.
ditto medicare... with different sums involved.
Ayn Rand's philosophy would have held the gvmt was stealing from her all those years. So where is the hypocricy in finding a way to recover a small fraction of the stolen money?
Not that there aren't plenty of ways for conservatives to be hypocritical. I have always felt gvmt's supporting non-profits was improper so, for years, I did not deduct my church or other charitable giving from my taxes nor did I bank at a credit union.
Now I do both, a clear hypocricy.
Soon I will begin collecting Social Security. I will do that with no feelings of hypocricy at all. I paid, in cash and lost opportunity, ten or twenty dollars for every dollar I will recover even if I live for a long time.
Huh?
ReplyDeleteJP didn't bank at a credit union or deduct for charitable contribution 'for years' or ... does that mean he does both now?
And what's the deal about credit unions, which are private businesses owned and run by members, returning good value for investment? I thought JP LIKED successful private businesses. Maybe he just doesn't like the business model, which rewards all its owners, not just the pocketbooks of a few hyper-inflated egos of top executives. Of course as a hyper-randian, he probably thinks only the owners at the top of the organizational chart really deserve rewards.
Then there's the notion that government has been "stealing" money from him for SS and Medicare, so its fine for him to recoup some of it. He's not really stealing, right, Just Getting His Back.
So he'll proudly take SS and Medicare and anything else he can get. But let's think for a moment. Did/do his parents or grandparents, aunts or uncles etc collect SS or use Medicare? That's a big part of what his "stolen" SS and medicare paid. And it's self-evident from JP's comments about hypothetical accumulated wealth via private investing that he would have invested it ALL and NOT used it to support his parents or grandparents in any way, shape or form. Nor should anyone expect him too, since every upstanding hyper-individualistic AynRandian egocentric superman knows in his Heart of Hearts (if any hearts are involved, that is) that parents and other family members have the obligation to TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES, just like everyone else.
I wonder if JP, if he had any children, required them to pay their way for everything, too -- I mean, you've got to teach kids to be rugged individuals from the get-go, right? No molly-cuddling them just 'cause they are small! Well, maybe he supported them for a few years, but then as a good MeFirstAllTheTime Randian, he doubtless made them pay him back, with interest of course, to cover his lost investment potential. Or maybe he figures that the kids do their payback to him when he's elderly. (I sure hope that the Petree family accountant has been keeping all all those detailed financial records straight, so that no one Pays Too Much, including consideration of things like changes in currency values & cost of living.)
Sheesh.
Okay Jack,
ReplyDeleteThe hypocrisy is that Ms Rand did this on the sly. She got her benefits very discreetly while very loudly criticizing anyone else who used those same benefits.
Do as I say, not as I do?
Bravo to the Sierra.
Apexnerd... good point regarding her doing it on the sly... people should stand up and be counted... You do and, sometimes, I try to...
ReplyDeleteRe: Anon...
Yes, for years I did not deduct nor bank at a credit union... I do both now... that was my point...
As to the collective ownership of the credit unions, all well and good... They are, however, non-profits and, as such, have a competitive advantage... I would have no problem with a bank owned by those with deposits on hand, paying corporate income tax and operating on a level playing field...
By the way, the billions, maybe trillions, spent by both the previous administration and the present administration to prop up mega banking corporations is even more offensive.
Two failures... the large banks criminally misused the money thus robbing the smaller community banks of an opportunity to survive and, the Obama Administration in power for most of the corporate welfare times failed to force the banks getting the handouts to live up to the obligations the handouts placed on them.
As to Ayn Rand, you point to an important point... she was neither liberal nor conservative... I like your characterization "hyper-individualistic." That is what she was.
As to my children, I do not ask for payback. When they want something from me I negotiate the number of diaper changes they have to provide when I get old.
I don't think too many modern people who've actually studied Rand's Objectivist theory in detail would come away thinking she was much more than a crackpot. She was considered a crackpot at the time by conservative intellectuals.
ReplyDeleteWhat you get are folks who read one of her novels as children and came to the conclusion it depicted reality or a reality one should strive for.
This gets all mixed up with economics as a Calvinist Protestant morality play, that somehow there is something "good" or "evil" about people at the far ends of the income spectrum, with very little appreciation that most wealth is inherited and most of what remains is acquired through nepotism and favorable circumstances. Market economics not a fairie tale in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished.