OK, so if my house is burgled and someone takes my TV set it’s not immoral for me to break into your house and steal yours because I’m just trying to get even? That’s how you justify this shit? And it’s even worse than that, because there’s no nexus between the people in charge of the Institute and the monies received by the Institute. Unless you’re saying that there’s just a giant bag of money there and they split it up on a quarterly basis, being careful of course never to receive more compensation than the taxes they paid.
If your house is burgled by me, and the TV that I took gets offered back to you by me, and you take it back from me, then I’m not going to call what you’re doing hypocrisy.
Let’s say they do; what then?
In this case I submit that it’s a ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’ situation for them personally and as ARI reps.
We can parse this further if you like. If an admin (or whoever) was just fired because the income to ARI dried up, and they were only there for the job, no hypocrisy involved in hoping for gov’t assistance. More hypocrisy if it’s a ‘true believer’ in the cause, but he/she’s got kids to feed. Still some hypocrisy if ARI management says, ‘Well, we’re not comfortable with the idea but we want to keep from firing our employees’; Speaking engagement have dried up so this is no time for stubbornly clinging to dorm-room philosophies. (That would show some humility at least). But that’s not what appears to be happening. So they get full hypocrisy points for their position.
I’m genuinely not getting your point. If, as you say, there’s a “true believer” who has kids to feed, it seems to me they can say — with mere sincerity — “hey, when I got taxed, I said I’d rather just keep the money and use it to buy food; and, now that they’re offering to hand me that money, I’ll shrug and use it to buy food, while pointing out that everyone involved could’ve just let me keep that money in between.” How is that hypocrisy?
If they are dividing up a giant bag of money quarterly then they’re committing several types of fraud. You realize of course that none of the earnings of a 501© corporation may inure to any individual or shareholder.
I realize that it’s part of the neoconservative’s “starve the beast strategy” to weaken the government enough to drown it in a bathtub, but just because it’s part of your strategy to be a hypocrite doesn’t make you not a hypocrite.
Are we really going to have this fucking conversation again? How many more times do we need to do the ‘living in a functioning society requires public services which require public funding that comes from taxes’, ad nauseam.
In this case, yes, he/she is still a hypocrite and need to develop a new life philosophy. Or not. I don’t care. I just don’t want to hear whining about being called a hypocrite if he/she does not.
Is there any such approach that you’d okay? Say a given individual had put X amount of money into the Institute each year for the last several years, and (a) would again put X amount in this year, but (b) doesn’t wind up putting any money in this year — possibly, upon noting that the government took X amount from her, and is willing to put X amount into the Institute. Would that pass muster with you on the ‘hypocrisy’ front? Would some other arrangement, with roughly the same goal?
As an aside: It’s on your issue list now tho, eh? 
No, I get that. But let me make sure we’re on the same page: imagine three people get taxed for, oh, say, a public ambulance service; hundreds of us in the community pay up, and then we come to the last three. Guy A reasonably says, “okay, sure.” Guy B says, “I’d rather not pay for this,” and means it, but pays up. Guy C also says “I’d rather not pay for this,” and pays up likewise.
Say the day comes when Guy B and Guy C get offered the chance to opt out; they can stop paying, and even get a refund for what they already paid in, by signing away their rights to that ambulance service. Guy B accepts the money; Guy C accepts the money likewise.
Guy A eventually gets injured and gets a free ambulance ride. Guy B gets injured and pays his own way to get to a doctor. Guy C gets injured and — demands a free ambulance ride, saying he’s entitled to what Guy A got.
You can of course mock Guy B, if you want. But I’d like to know: what’s your opinion of Guy C? Is he, in some way, worse?
First you say, “No, I get that.” Then you immediately proceed to show how you don’t ‘get that’.
So, now I’m confused about why you’d create a scenario which I specifically excluded and proceed to quiz me about it.
The Ayn Rand Institute is a non-profit. They don’t pay taxes. So the story is “Taxation is unfair to me even though I don’t pay taxes, and nobody should get the tax money from others. But it’s ok if I take your tax money because anything that’s good for me is ok.”
I “get that”, as you note, living in a functioning society requires public services which require public funding which comes from taxes: a police department here, a fire station there; sure, granted, of course.
I merely add that not all public services rise to that level. It seems to me entirely possible to grant, on the one hand, that a publicly-funded police force is a necessity — even while adding that a publicly-funded ambulance service may not be a necessity — and while arguing even more vociferously against needing a publicly-funded program that simply takes money from a given taxpayer and then hands it right back to him instead of pooling it to purchase a vehicle or whatever.
We can agree that some things are needed for a functioning society, and agree that yet others aren’t, and then debate about some that arguably qualify but maybe they don’t.
But it seems to me that they specifically say, in the link someone posted upthread, that the taxpayer-provided funds will be coming from ”its contributors, many of whom have already been damaged financially. Since raising taxes is not politically viable, the stimulus will be paid for by “deficit financing” — a euphemism for raiding everyone’s savings. If ARI gets government relief money, it will be, for us, partial restitution for government-inflicted losses.”
Sure. So let’s talk about the PPP/CARES as it pertains to the ARI, not ambulances.
Do I think that ARI should be denied PPP on the grounds that their philosophy is in opposition to gov’t assistance which ‘takes from one to give to another’, or gives back what it took under extenuating circumstances? No, I do not. I think they can rightly be mocked and called hypocrites especially given their public statements. But I do not say they must therefore be denied on those grounds.
They can say that all they want, that money is coming from my taxes and it’s my savings that will get raided, so I should get a government loan too, except they don’t say that do they?
I agree that they should, in fact, be equally okay with that.
It would be hard for me to envision an interpretation of Ayn Rand’s philosophy that would allow the transfer of rights and responsibilities from one person to another, be that an actual person or a corporate person. To say that a non-profit corporation created as a public charity can in some back door way reimburse individuals involved with that corporation without running roughshod over the principles espoused in her writing strains credulity.
In Ayn Rand’s works I can think of only one individual who transferred government money to others. It was Ragnar Danneskjöld, who took government money by force, his guns against theirs with his life on the line. He did not cheat on his taxes to give the money to others. He was a pirate, not a chiseler.
But they aren’t. What they say is that no one should get government money, period. But then they take it. Pure hypocrisy, but that’s what Objectivism is about, what’s good for me is good, what’s good for you is bad.
But that’s just it: I believe their philosophy isn’t in opposition to getting back money they’d paid in. I believe, given their stated remarks, that the individuals in question claim to be providing the exact tax revenue which will be handed to the ARI via PPP, and that they’d say they’d have gladly put those funds into ARI without passing it through PPP first — and that they’d be vulnerable to a charge of hypocrisy for taking my money to do it, but not for clawing their money back.
But, as near as I can tell, what they’re saying isn’t “that no one should get government money, period.” They’re saying that, if there’s some amount of money they — or you — genuinely would’ve preferred not to hand over, in exchange for something that wasn’t wanted, then getting it back as mere restitution is fine by them.
If they explicitly take that position on Getting Government Money, would you say isuch a position isn’t hypocrisy?