saxitoxin wrote:Social security is an insurance program, not a welfare program.
insurance - payment for damage, provided for a fee (e.g. social security)
welfare - payment for damage, provided for free (e.g. AFDC)
Where did Ayn Rand criticize people who made withdrawals from the U.S. social security system? Did you hear about it on YouTube or did you actually read something she wrote? I anticipate your forthcoming silence will be an indication of the former.
Don't challenge me son, you cannot handle me.
Atlas Shrugged sits on my bookshelf right next to the
Gulag Archipelago.
I've made the distinction myself between social insurance and welfare on this forum. You probably learned it from me. But she was opposed to both.
Ayn Rand favored
Laissez-faire form of economics.
Laissez-faire is an economic environment in which transactions between private parties are free from tariffs, government subsidies, and enforced monopolies, with only enough government regulations sufficient to protect property rights against theft and aggression. The phrase laissez-faire is French and literally means "let [them] do", but it broadly implies "let it be," "let them do as they will," or "leave it alone." Scholars generally believe a laissez-faire state or a completely free market has never existed.[1][2]
You can visit
aynrand.org where they blame Social Security for partially increasing our national debt somehow.
By now it’s no secret that I think Social Security is an unjust monstrosity by which the elderly live off the work of younger generations. So what should be done about it?
The only moral solution—the only one that puts an end to the wealth redistribution and protects people’s right to keep what they earn—is to abolish Social Security entirely.
But anyway you're asking a trick question because she was a philosopher who's claim to fame was her fiction. And Laissez-Faire.
Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged wrote:Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.
^This quote probably only makes sense if you read the book.