thegreekdog wrote:If I understand social security, and I think I do, a person contributes money to a fund which the government holds. At the end of a certain period of time, the money is released in increments to the person who contributed the money.
So, if that is the definition of a parasite, I suppose I'm mooching off of my local bank.
To be 100% honest, I read her book and I'm not all-together clear on her use of the word "Parasite." I think that it means anyone who accepts or lives on money that was redistributed to them. But again, I'm not for certain if her use of the word was limited to that. A "looter" is someone who takes your money with the threat of force, and a "moocher" is someone who doesn't work for a living, but instead relies on welfare and such. Ayn Rand believed that Social Security was wealth redistribution because when it went into effect, the elderly who were receiving payments hadn't hardly payed anything in. They were living off of the labor of the younger generations.
I'm sorry it's just that as an admitted Libertarian, I had assumed erroneously that you had read Atlas Shrugged. Weirdos out here love the book. So I apologize for that.
Her counselor and law firm affirm that they had to convince her to accept Social Security and Medicaid. But again I stress that she still accepted Social Security
and Medicaid. I've noticed that everyone is taking exception to the fact that she accepted Social Security and they're ignoring my point that she also applied for
Medicaid under a fake name.
And again, that's not me attempting to dismantle her philosophy. That's another argument entirely. Yeah I do think Libertarianism is nonsense and dangerous, but that's a whole other discussion. People need to stop worshiping Rand as
Jesus-the-sequel who also hated the poor and accept that she was inherently fallible because she was human.
For example,
Thomas Jefferson has been a great influence on me. I believe him to be a great hero. I mean, just a mountain of a man. I love to read everything that he wrote, even the biography of his life. Did you know that he kept a lock of his wife's hair until he died? He couldn't bring him self to ever marry again after she died. That's beautiful and powerful and sad.
But I can accept that he was also a hypocrite and darkly ill-informed when it came to Africans. He railed against slavery but refused to free his slaves, even upon death. And he once wrote that slaves smell because half of their body waste emptied out through their sweat.
Even Marcus Aurelius, who's my favorite philosopher, was also a terrifying butcher. Men are men.