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Russian-born American author Ayn Rand, who is best known for her didactic novels championing capitalism and individualism, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, also wrote several philosophical works, essays, lectures, and newsletters elaborating on her ethos of Objectivism. In all these writings, Rand defended the rights of individual freedom and ownership of property, which she regarded as absolute and inviolable, against every encroachment of collectivism, broadly defined as the subjugation of the individual to a group. In her book of essays Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, she wrote: In terms of the individual's relationship to the state (whose only valid reason for existing, she claimed, is to defend the safety and rights of its citizens), Rand believed that all taxation should be strictly voluntary. She therefore regarded every instance of the involuntary appropriation or redistribution of wealth as a violation of the rights of the individuals from whom money is taken — i.e., theft: Unsurprisingly, then, the so-called welfare state, with its systematic redistribution of wealth as social entitlements, was Rand's bogeyman of choice. Economist Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman and an early espouser of Rand's laissez-faire philosophy, wrote: Although Social Security is usually framed as retirement insurance (pay in while you're working, then withdraw savings upon retirement), a 2014 article on the Ayn Rand Institute web site argues that it is a form of welfare: In 2010, journalist and former media rep for the Ayn Rand Institute Scott McConnell compiled an oral history of Rand in which Evva Pryor, who worked as a consultant to the law firm that represented Rand, admitted to helping the aging author and her husband apply for and receive Social Security benefits in the mid-1970s. McConnell's book, 100 Voices: an Oral History of Ayn Rand comprised scores of transcribed interviews with scores of Rand's friends, family members, and associates. McConnell interviewed Pryor in 1998, 16 years after Rand's death. An archivist for the Ayn Rand Institute told us that although most of Rand's financial records were destroyed at the time of her death and they have no physical evidence of her receiving Social Security distributions, Evva Pryor's testimony was backed up by Rand's secretary, Cynthia Peikoff, who helped the author with her finances during the last two years of her life and reported seeing Social Security checks. The archivist also told us that proof that Rand paid into the Social Security system earlier in life exists in the form of an application for a Social Security card, the card itself, and legal correspondence from the mid-1940s inquiring about a refund of Social Security withholdings. In 2010, freelance writer Patia Stephens reported obtaining a Social Security Administration record via FOIA request showing that Ayn Rand collected a total of $11,002 in Social Security payments between 1974 and her death in 1982 (her husband, Frank O'Connor, also collected benefits until his death). Upon the release of the book containing Pryor's testimony, critics of Ayn Rand's uncompromising libertarian ethos wasted no time pointing out the apparent inconsistency and hypocrisy of her acceptance of government payments. In an op-ed titled Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare When She Needed Them, AlterNet's Joshua Holland wrote: Center for the Study of the American Dream Founding Director Michael Ford wrote: Point acknowledged. Yet the accusation of hypocrisy rests on an assumption that nowhere in Rand's vast oeuvre had she ever made a case for accepting money from the government. However, she did, in fact, make such a case in a 1966 essay, The Question of Scholarships. It is morally defensible for those who decry publicly-funded scholarships, Social Security benefits, and unemployment insurance to turn around and accept them, Rand argued, because the government had taken money from them by force (via taxes). There's only one catch: the recipient must regard the receipt of said benefits as restitution, not a social entitlement. Those who advocate public scholarships [or Social Security benefits] have no right to them; those who oppose them have, Rand wrote. In fact, she seemed to see it as something approaching the duty of those opposed to the redistribution of wealth to accept such payments: Ayn Rand Institute Chief Content Officer Onkar Ghate addressed the apparent paradox of Rand's position in a 2014 article, The Myth About Ayn Rand and Social Security: The flaw in this argument is that it only adds up if you accept Rand's characterization of involuntary taxation as legalized plunder and her assertion that it confers upon those who object to it on principle (and, by some interpretations, only those who object to it on principle) the right to financial restitution. Flawed or not, however, the fact that she articulated the position puts paid to the charge that her acceptance of Social Security benefits in later life was hypocritical. On her own terms, it was not.
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