…The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 16, was a humanitarian who had said, “The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent. Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the needy is concerned.”
So, at last, Ayn Rand reached the end of her gleeful passage along the corridors of the fictional Taggart Comet, explaining as she went why those in the compartments she passed deserved to die.
George Soros, humanitarian and hate figure (Credit: Wikipedia commons)
It is obviously a difficult life, being a humanitarian. Excelling in Rand’s identification of such people as hate figures, George Soros has reputedly given away more than $32 billion to causes that he supports. Chicken feed, perhaps, compared to the $77.2 billion reportedly held by the Gates Foundation, but still a healthy sum. Has this made him loved? In some quarters, of course, but in others he is rated as Enemy No 1. The mere mention of his name is enough to cause a firestorm on social media, his Open Society Foundation has been banned in Hungary, where Viktor Orban continues an unremitting campaign against the (Hunngarian-born) man himself, and in the US Donald Trump is mobilising the Justice Department against him and all his works.
It can, however, very easily be shown that it is not from the men of ability but from the incompetents (such as the Thatcher/Major Conservative government of the late twentieth century) that Soros made his fortune. A man, one would have thought, whom the Rand addicts of the current US administration would hail as a hero.
But he gives money away.
The ultimate Rand sin.
And, as Rand completes her walk along the corridors, I too, will end my regular monthly Ayn Rand blog. Her works are a rich storehouse of nonsense dressed up as philosophy, but even the most capacious store can be emptied. Only when something new is added will I return to it, to plunder a little more.