Lack of Empathy, Musk, and Trump's heroine, Ayn Rand

[Clouds Passing]

1. Their drunken hero needed gubmint benefits near the end of her life

https://www.openculture.com/2016/12/when-ayn-rand-collected-social-security-medicare.html

“Rand taught “there is no such thing as the public interest,” that programs like Social Security and Medicare steal from “creators” and illegitimately redistribute their wealth. This was a “sublimely enticing argument for wealthy businessmen who had no interest whatever in the public interest.… Yet the taxpayers of America paid Rand’s and Frank O’Connor’s medical expenses.” Randians have offered many convoluted explanations for what her critics see as sheer hypocrisy. We may or may not find them persuasive.

In the simplest terms, Rand discovered at the end of her life that she was only human and in need of help. Rather than starve or drop dead—as she would have let so many others do—she took the help on offer. Rand died in 1982, as her admirer Alan Greenspan had begun putting her ideas into practice in Reagan’s administration, making sure, writes Weiss, that the system was “more favorable to the creators and entrepreneurs who were more valuable to society,” in his Randian estimation, “than people lower down the ladder of success.” After well over three decades of such policies, we can draw our own conclusions about the results.”

Some Russian aristocrat hero she was