a) Do you think it is responsible to be opaque on whom you are attributing the belief to, particularly considering the topic of conversation and the fact that her warnings on the matter were clear?
b) These people you cite, are they Ayn Rand supporters, or critics who "think", despite no actual evidence beyond 4th hand also-uneducated opinions, that Rand's philosophy was anything remotely resembling "I've got mine, fuck you." Here's a fun experiment: try to google up a statement by an actual Objectivism supporter that supports anything near that sentiment, and observe how many false hits you get of the latter in your search.
> I'm not critiquing her personally or her philosophy.
Of those HN'ers who hold an opinion on Rand, you belong to a very exclusive club in my experience. Regardless, your sentiment now being explicit is good enough for me, thanks for straightening it out.
I asked a question specifically about that above, see: (b)
Is asking for substantiation of a claim, an insulting claim at that, now considered improper etiquette around these parts?
Ask yourself this: how do you know this to be true? Can you share where you've encountered Randians in sufficient numbers to form an opinion with high certainty? And, can you no longer find any trace of these people and their words?
Thank you for the courtesy.
It always depresses me to read comments like this. Rand's central themes were about corrupt relationships between pseudo-capitalists and government, the immorality of a desire for the unearned, and the consequences of what will happen to a society that can't be bothered to concern themselves with ethics.
Well, one of these days these chickens are going to come home to roost, and instead of people hanging their heads in shame and regret because they ignored her supremely confident warnings, instead they're going to charge her with the crime. The irony.
"The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash - that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value."
As a cherry on top, while there's still time to recover from mistakes of the past (there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, as they say), rather than eating a little humble pie, listening for a change to those who said "I told you so", and getting our affairs in order, we will actually choose to blaze straight ahead at full throttle on the exact same trajectory. And in the end, we'll end up selling off infrastructure, piecemeal, for pennies on the dollar, some to the very criminals we were warned about, and the rest to other nations who were smart enough to crack a book.