Sorry, but there are more poor people who are hardworking than there are rich.
It's Rand's argument that's flawed: When you start from nothing, you can't achieve greatness except by raw luck. This has been shown again and again in economics game theory experiments, and it proves out in observations of real people.
Is it not passion that inspires someone to work three jobs, just to barely support their family? To come to a country where you don't even speak the language and take jobs that pay less than the legal minimum wage, living packed in like sardines, again just so that you can send most of the money back to your family? You can find hundreds of thousands of hard working, passionate people who are living close to or under the poverty line. In Rand's version of reality, those people would all be rich, and only the lazy ones would be poor.
Sure you can point to a few people who've dragged themselves up from really crappy conditions to multi-millionaires. But they're the exception--and it's not because they were the most hardworking, but a combination of hard work and luck.
Sorry if I gave that impression: Poor people are not demonized directly in Atlas Shrugged, at least not that I can remember. It has been a long time since I read the book.
But objectivist politics does blame poor people for their plight--or at best, simply ignores them and leaves them to their fate. "Not my problem" seems to be the general response.
I submit that, until everyone has been given equal opportunities to forge their own destiny, it's immoral to remove the safety net. And that even if people really did have equal opportunities to succeed, that it benefits society to prevent the people who really screw up from starving and living on the streets.
And to do that you need money, which means (at a minimum) taxes. And you also need regulations to protect workers from being exploited--which means no laissez-faire capitalism.
It's Rand's argument that's flawed: When you start from nothing, you can't achieve greatness except by raw luck. This has been shown again and again in economics game theory experiments, and it proves out in observations of real people.
Is it not passion that inspires someone to work three jobs, just to barely support their family? To come to a country where you don't even speak the language and take jobs that pay less than the legal minimum wage, living packed in like sardines, again just so that you can send most of the money back to your family? You can find hundreds of thousands of hard working, passionate people who are living close to or under the poverty line. In Rand's version of reality, those people would all be rich, and only the lazy ones would be poor.
Sure you can point to a few people who've dragged themselves up from really crappy conditions to multi-millionaires. But they're the exception--and it's not because they were the most hardworking, but a combination of hard work and luck.