This article runs into several of the issues that plague Rand in general.

First, it rails against the option of living as a parasite. But parasitism is a valid evolutionary strategy, and there's no rational reason any given human being should avoid choosing it. Indeed, it makes much more sense for an average person to prefer a system that allows them to engage in a certain amount of "parasitism" than it does for them to support a system where they are left at the mercy of the handful of people at one end of the IQ bell curve.

Second, it treats "individual thought" as the primary method of man's survival rather than the much better candidate of "social conditioning". You may have to think hard about how to eat and what to eat if you are trapped alone on a desert island, but in real life most people are guided into jobs that earn them money they can go to spend at the supermarket, where the poisonous berries have already been screened out.

Third, it presupposes that there is an objective psychological thing called a "human being" with a fixed nature. But people are wildly varied and, well, not as collective as Rand ironically assumes. So you get statements such as "you can't find happiness in procrastination, promiscuity, or pot", which is laughable given how many people find real enjoyment in those things.

Basically, while Rand is very interesting in that she lays out her premises very clearly and straightforwardly, in a way that few other philosophers dare to do, she ends up falling prey to the fact that she is writing in reaction to her communist upbringing, and so therefore ends up basically accepting a communist framework. She becomes a mirror image of Marx, agreeing that society is defined by a class struggle, only siding with the other class. But the Marxist framework is inherently flawed and reductive, and cannot be saved merely by flipping it.

Stopped reading after the first use of parasite. Any philosophy which dehumanizes the disabled (and anyone else not productive under capitalism) doesn’t have much productive to say about morality. You look like a monster when you describe everyone from lovable puppies to children dying of cancer as parasites. There’s more to morality than greed.

[removed]

Yeah I mean human behavior, motives, and their placement in a society are far more complicated and nuanced. No person is an absolute parasite or absolutely productive.

I mean by this standard all retired old people are useless parasites.

I agree with what looks like the general consensus here that the use of "parasite" is at best uncharitable.

And it goes against any view which suggests that people generally desire to live well and to thrive at some fundamental level. In my opinion, thriving can require work, and yes it's true that hard work can help us to be happy, but that's where the industrialized protestant work ethic seems to want us to stop to suit capitalism's interests. In reality, when work starts to look like slavery, there is a point where thriving begins to end, and sometimes workers even die. Thriving may not always look like productivity, nor is it always a constant. In fact I'd go so far as to say that so-called "parasites" don't fail to thrive because they don't desire to thrive, but because they are denied the opportunity to do so thanks to an antiquated ideology which deliberately limits their capacity to thrive and seeks to use said "parasites" as a motivator to push everyone else to work harder.

But, to be a little more business-minded and less emotive, this still doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider that innovation, creative works, etc, as a driving force that pushes a healthy economy beyond mere industry, relies heavily on people who sacrifice their time for little to no pay, and so to motivate these people to stop what they're doing and to work harder has got to be one of the most nonsensical anti-capitalist ideas that capitalism promotes.

Meanwhile, the priveleged few, infants really, have the red carpet rolled out for them to receive billions to run fraudulent pyramid schemes, revealing that it isn't very much about hard work at all. Our sacred system is not only broken, it's gangrenous and needs massive amputations. Is there any point where we may correctly conclude that we need something better, or are we effectively locked into going down with the ship by our sacred dogma?