I don't see that taking advantage of things that the state offers you even if you don't feel that the state should offer them is hypocritical. There are lots of things that I don't think the state should provide out of taxation. However, I have to pay that tax whether I like it or not, so I'd be 'cutting off my own nose to spite my face' if I didn't what the state said I was entitled to.
It's certainly not hypocritical if you use as Rand's premise, "maximising one's personal gain is the only good."
However, arguing for the superiority of minarchist/anarchocapitalist societies while suckling at the teat of the nanny state certainly strikes those of us who don't accept the above premise as hypocritical. Rand wasn't using Social Security and Medicare out of a principled stand, but out of dire personal need... a strong argument against the superiority of minimialist/anarchocapitalist society.
-- Steve's a strong believer in social safety nets, because one can be more creative and innovative when a single failure doesn't lead to utter destruction. You get greater successes when rewarding successes than you do when penalising failures.
It's certainly her admitting that there are times that people need state aid. It's therefore hypocritical of her to carry on lobbying against it after she used it.
But maybe if it wasn't for the extra taxation required to pay for that service, she would have made her own arrangements* out of the money she didn't pay in taxes.
I'm not saying this definitely would have happened, but maybe that was her logic.
* With private sector suppliers who perhaps wouldn't have been crowded out by the public sector.
If that was her logic, then she was either innumerate or just too wedded to her dogma to see the gaping chasm between what she'd paid in taxes and what it costs to deal with old age and cancer in addition to the other "true" costs of government services she'd used for so many decades.
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I don't see that taking advantage of things that the state offers you even if you don't feel that the state should offer them is hypocritical. There are lots of things that I don't think the state should provide out of taxation. However, I have to pay that tax whether I like it or not, so I'd be 'cutting off my own nose to spite my face' if I didn't what the state said I was entitled to.
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However, arguing for the superiority of minarchist/anarchocapitalist societies while suckling at the teat of the nanny state certainly strikes those of us who don't accept the above premise as hypocritical. Rand wasn't using Social Security and Medicare out of a principled stand, but out of dire personal need... a strong argument against the superiority of minimialist/anarchocapitalist society.
-- Steve's a strong believer in social safety nets, because one can be more creative and innovative when a single failure doesn't lead to utter destruction. You get greater successes when rewarding successes than you do when penalising failures.
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I'm not saying this definitely would have happened, but maybe that was her logic.
* With private sector suppliers who perhaps wouldn't have been crowded out by the public sector.
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-- Steve wouldn't doubt the latter possibility, given what'd given her that cancer in the first place.