Ayn Rand Took Great Delight In Killing Large Numbers of Fictional Moochers In Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand's "philosophy" is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil ~ Gore Vidal (10/3/1925 to 7/31/2012) a political commentator, essayist and novelist who identified with the liberal politicians and the progressive social causes of the Democratic Party.

I think that this, the killing of worthless moochers and takers in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged (AS), shows that when Rand claimed (see video below) that she did not hate the poor, she lied. Haters usually deny that they're haters. Often they even deny it to themselves. So, even though Rand lied (to herself as well as the public) her writings show she hated poor people. People she referred to as "lice", "looters", "moochers", "parasites" and "takers".

For the record, I have not (nor do I ever intend to) read any of her fiction doorstops (or other published works). What follows are excerpts from articles I found online wherein the article author describes (and comments on) Rand's mass killings of fictional moochers.

when a railway worker in AS decides to punish the wicked socialist government by making a train crash happen, Rand implies the passengers had it coming. She runs through the politics of the train crash victims, implying they were accessories to the socialist government that is being justly punished... [one victim was] an elderly school teacher who spent her life turning class after class of helpless schoolchildren into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil..." And so endlessly on, through over a dozen deserving victims. "There was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas", she notes - so let them burn. (excerpt from a 3/10/2009 HuffPo article by Johann Hari).

But this killing of an entire train full of moochers is just the beginning! The death toll rises considerably when the evil Galt character (the "hero") withdraws to his gulch, from which he encourages other rich a-holes to engage in acts of terror in order to overthrow the socialist government.

Calvin Atwood runs a monopoly for electrical power, and his "going Galt" cuts off the electrical supply for a solid third of North America. Thomas Hendricks' new surgical technique was pushed to the forefront due to government support, resulting in other methods of stroke prevention being ignored, and undeveloped, so when he "went Galt" he directly murdered thousands of people as a result. Atlas Shrugged is littered with these people. Ayn presented them as heroic figures, the same way in which Osama Bin Laden presented the 9/11 hijackers. In the end, these were common terrorists, common criminals, with John Galt at their head. The blood of millions stained theirs, and John Galt's, hands. (excerpt from John Galt Is A Terrorist by Nathaniel Downes. Addicting Info 12/29/2012).

Millions of looters dead, huh? Perhaps the "non productive people" deserved to die, given the fact that "society damned the wealthy for being productive by expropriating the fruits of their labor". Taxed them too much, in other words. Perhaps we should be thankful that the Koch plutocrats are only trying to buy the presidency and install their Wanker puppet, instead of hatching a plan to kill a significant number of people in order to stop society from cruelly damning them with a relatively low tax rate? (As the rich become super-rich, they pay lower taxes. For real).

In the video below, Rand says (re poor people) that we shouldn't "tailor everything for their convenience". "Convenience" being "the state of being able to proceed with something with little effort or difficulty". Yeah, it isn't difficult being poor at all. Even though it should be. We don't want the poor to get too comfortable in that social safety net hammock, right?

This would be the hammock that Paul Ryan referred to when he said "we don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives". However, as Paul Krugmann points out in his article The Hammock Fallacy, "Mr. Ryan and colleagues outright misstate what the research says" and that "the reason so many Americans remain trapped in poverty isn't that the government helps them too much; it's that it helps them too little".

Rand did not want to help poor people AT ALL, and so "opposed all forms of welfare" (Ryan's Ayn Rand obsession). If that isn't hate, it surely is total indifference and a complete lack of empathy.

But, as Rand gleefully killing large numbers of moochers in Atlas Shrugs shows, her disdain for the parasites clearly rises to the level of hate. "The best way to help the poor is to not be one of them", Rand says (quoting prosperity theologist Reverend Ike). She also wrote that if a man "does not choose to live, nature will take its course". Poor people who starve, freeze to death in the winter, or croak due to not being able to afford medical treatment have surely CHOSEN not to live, since it's possible (in Rand's view) to chose to not be poor.

So... there should be no welfare (at all) and if poor people choose to be poor nature will take it's course and they will die.

Video: Did Ayn Rand hate the poor? My verdict? Yes, she absolutely loathed them (1:14).

SWTD #303, ARHP #1.