It's hard to type when I'm giggling, but the above paragraph is just downright silly. You claim she has a "false" premise and then supply a definition of "greater good" that proves her premise to be true. What you fail to understand is that you're discussing value based philosophies. Your philosophy seems to be that nobody is "undeserving" therefore her premise must be false. Some people believe that there are those that are undeserving, and there's no objective way to prove this true or false.
Take someone who lives on the streets begging for money and not working. The very streets they walk are the result of "contributors" and by definition they are "benefiting" from them. Are they undeserving? She says they are, and you say they are not.
You make the same mistake Rand makes. You cherry pick the need (a lazy bum) and you cherry pick the outcome (getting support from people who earned it).
Your assumption is that anyone using anything they didn't personally earn must, by definition, be a non contributor. Rand was given the money to pay for her trip to America. She was supported by relatives in New York including giving her money to get to Hollywood and live until she got a job. She went to school in Russia and in New York. She didn't earn any money until she got a job as an extra in a movie in Hollywood.
You, like Rand, are saying that only the individual matters. This ignores the reality that all of us are both individuals and members of the group. Contributions to the group such as educating our children collectively is but one area where the individual benefits by contributing to the group.
From there the arguments continue to center around who "deserves" what. Many people believe that children are deserving, but the unemployed, alcoholic, Montel-watching parents are not. They want a welfare system that takes care of the children without benefiting the parents. Others believe that a system that helps the children can have some level of acceptable "loss" with "undeserving" parents receiving "benefits." Some go as far as saying the system must help those that need it most regardless of the "losses" to those that don't deserve it. At the other end some argue that if you help the children at all, you're helping the parents, so don't help them at all.
Again your view of people in need is anemic. You include only the stereotype that is easy to denigrate.
Rand did the same. She witnessed her parent's store in Russia confiscated by the people Rand felt had not earned the store while her parents had. Therefore ALL contributions from the individual to the group fit in this category in Rand's view. It is simply a false picture of the broader reality.
It's all a matter of degree. Your black and white view and claims of "false" premises are downright ignorant and silly.
It's not a matter of degree. It is a matter of false underlying premises that the non-contributing proletariat steals from the contributing John Galts.
In the real world, many people work hard and by circumstance are poor. Some of those people who took over Rand's parent's store in Russia had worked hard their entire lives only to be kept down by people with the resources to oppress the poor. Rand was well aware of government corruption having the same problematic influence on the ideal laissez faire market as non-corrupt government influence on the market. But Rand never spoke of the 'proletariat' as anything other than non-contributors stealing from her contributing family. In reality, while Rand's family may or may not have contributed to the reason the 'proletariat' rose up against the rich in Russia, many of those rising up had been hard working people oppressed by the rich and powerful. It was by circumstance, not by their own deeds necessarily, that put many people in the positions they were in, in Russia at the time.
Rand seemed oblivious to the circumstances that placed her in the ownership class she was born into. Instead, Rand was convinced if you were well off, you deserved it and if you weren't well off it was your own doing. She certainly recognized the problem of undo influence such as government corruption. But circumstance never seemed to cross into her observations of why those supposed non-producers may have not been successful.
No, they don't. You can't seriously argue that Rand believed the profits from her books were entirely of her own doing and that the editors, printers, bankers, shipping companies, bookstores, cashiers, and all the other thousands of people involved played no part.
Those are not the people Rand refused to recognize that I am talking about. [Snide comment that you obviously can't read withheld.] Rand refused to recognize the help she got as a young woman, from relatives who didn't know her until she arrived in New York. Rand always spoke of herself as being entirely on her own from the time she left Russia and that is not true.
Their argument is basically that there are those who are part of the productive system and those that are not, and that those that "do" shouldn't be called upon to support those that "don't" because that ultimately hurts everyone. If everyone were to be a "doer" then we'd all be better off, and any social system that does not encourage everyone to be a "doer" is immoral. It's a gross simplification, but so is your claim about their philosophy.
Sounds good on paper. Translates into revolutions, crime, and people dying on the streets when put into practice.
The people who are true non-contributors that could contribute but choose not to is a very small minority of most populations. These people certainly do not compromise a proportion as large as Rand imagines in "Atlas Shrugged".
The interesting thing about that is if the laws are what's preventing discrimination from happening, then the moral issue of racism is still there. In other words you haven't actually solved the moral issue at all - you just made it harder to act on a belief system you don't support. Since you're not affecting the moral positions, the justification for these laws must really be a practical one. That's a huge debate in itself.
I've not claimed that one can legislate away racism. It takes legislation and time and other factors like educating children to be tolerant. The issue is how far can you take the philosophy of private property rights, not how do you make society more moral. [Second snide comment denigrating your reading skills withheld.]
