All this crap about being required to work for free is a big fat red herring. It’s just a meme used to garner an emotional reaction, and it’s sad that it is used to such effect, and that so many people claiming such intelligence are suckered by it like a conservative Christian watching Fox news.
No state in the union requires pro bono work. You can’t lose your license if you don’t do any.
You can lose your job if your employers want you to do some pro bono work and you don’t. But, being such a fan of the free market, Rand Rover should be more than glad to utilize the freedom to change jobs to work at a place where he doesn’t need to do pro bono work, up to and including starting his own firm (though I suspect as a paralegal, that would be tough).
So obviously, Rand Rover has made a simple economic decision, to wit: that the cost of doing pro bono work as a condition of his employment is outweighed by the benefit of the supposedly vast stacks of cash he makes, etc. etc. etc. His protests to the contrary are nothing but smoke being blown up your collective asses, and demonstrate the sort of intellectual rigor typical of objectivist tools – given the volume of posts he’s made about poor people finding better jobs or moving across the country or whatever, it’s ironic (and typical) that when the shoe is on the other foot he fails to apply his logic to his own situation.
Furthermore, lawyers have pro bono recommendations and value pro bono work simply because most of us aren’t self-absorbed shitheads – we want to at least try to do good things. Being charitable is a good thing (unless you’re a douchebag like Rand). Rand’s supposed employers value charity, and thus make a pro bono requirement. Deal with it.
But that’s not enough for him. Instead, he uses the legal profession’s ideals to be charitable and to be a force for societal good instead of a mercenary set of hired guns to flog the dead horse that is a slutty drugged-up Russian’s arch-conservative “philosophy” and to somehow extirpate the obvious self-loathing with which he is afflicted.
In other words, he hates the poors because it it props up his fragile ego to tell himself that he’s better than they are on a fundamental level – “There but for the grace of God” is a phrase that strikes him with abject subconscious terror and threatens to rend the fragile shell that he’s built up by believing really hard that he’s better than everyone else.
So let’s instead discuss the peculiar twisted psychology of a howling hypocrite and his fragile ego and blatant penis compensation instead of trying to take seriously the idea that somehow a profession’s desire to be charitable is a bad thing. Or better yet, let’s not discuss it, because it’s fucking stupid to waste your time trying to teach a pig to think, and it cuts down on the number of mouthbreathers (do I need to name names?) who are taken in by his schlock and think he has some sort of fucking point.
ETA: Assholes.