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Didn't Rand herself live off government handouts while she wrote her "books"?

It doesn't get more ironic than this.

Couldn't agree more. Bookmarked for my next bout with laissez-faire objectivists :-D

It's not ironic; it's consistent with a "me first" attitude.

Yeah, that's why I didn't say it is unexpected :-)

[shrug]

Can't get more Ayn Rand than this. She lived on social security and medicare in the later part of her life after all

I have been guilty of calling behavior like this “hypocrisy” in the past but actually have changed on this recently.

You don’t need to live in a way totally consistent with your ideal society if your current society is not ideal. Why? Partly because it’s impossible or at least extremely difficult.

Ayn rand couldn’t live without driving on roads paid for by the government, patronising businesses that received govt assistance, or relying on state police and firefighters to protect her property.

On top of that, her whole thing is radical selfishness, so if taking govt assistence helps you get ahead you should do it, right?

* I do want to note that I haven’t actually read any of Rand’s writings and am basing this off of what I know about her general philosophy on what the world should look like. If she’s ever said things like “you shouldn’t take any government assistance” then yeah she’s a total hypocrite.

Ayn Rand posited that taking government help is moral, as it was already paid by taxes many times over.

It's a bit like Warren Buffet complaining that he has a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, because long-term effective capital gains taxes are too low: He thinks it's wrong, but he still takes advantage of it. You can say, "These rules are unfair, they should be changed" while still playing the rules of the game the way they're written.

That said, there does seem to be something that smacks of hypocrisy in the case of the Ayn Rand case, more than in the Warren Buffet case. I think in particular, it's the idea that society would somehow be better without such safety nets: If you're using the safety nets, that's kind of proof that they're a good thing, isn't it?

"North Koreans wouldn't survive without government's daily handouts of rice. That's kind of proof that North Korean central planning system is a good thing, isn't it?"

Close, but not quite.

In your hypothetical scenario, North Koreans would certainly be able to sort themselves out without the daily handouts if they weren't being oppressed by the NK government.

Is it the case that the Ayn Rand Institute would have been perfectly capable of supporting themselves in this crisis if everyone had just been paying lower taxes and had fewer regulations? Perhaps people at the Institute think so, but I'm pretty skeptical.

If Warren Buffet wants to pay more taxes than legally required, I don't think he could do it. But Ayn Rand went out of her way to grab gvt handout while disparaging those doing the same thing. In my book, only of them is a hypocrite.