Ayn Rand Institute approved for PPP loan
reuters.com
reuters.com
You don’t need to live in a way totally consistent with your ideal society if your current society is not ideal. Why? Partly because it’s impossible or at least extremely difficult.
Ayn rand couldn’t live without driving on roads paid for by the government, patronising businesses that received govt assistance, or relying on state police and firefighters to protect her property.
On top of that, her whole thing is radical selfishness, so if taking govt assistence helps you get ahead you should do it, right?
* I do want to note that I haven’t actually read any of Rand’s writings and am basing this off of what I know about her general philosophy on what the world should look like. If she’s ever said things like “you shouldn’t take any government assistance” then yeah she’s a total hypocrite.
That said, there does seem to be something that smacks of hypocrisy in the case of the Ayn Rand case, more than in the Warren Buffet case. I think in particular, it's the idea that society would somehow be better without such safety nets: If you're using the safety nets, that's kind of proof that they're a good thing, isn't it?
In your hypothetical scenario, North Koreans would certainly be able to sort themselves out without the daily handouts if they weren't being oppressed by the NK government.
Is it the case that the Ayn Rand Institute would have been perfectly capable of supporting themselves in this crisis if everyone had just been paying lower taxes and had fewer regulations? Perhaps people at the Institute think so, but I'm pretty skeptical.