This is a pretty good list of the value judgments typically made by objectivists, and more generally libertarian-capitalists:
'First, in our system "underprivileged" people essentially do not exist. The percentage of people genuinely unable to support themselves is infintesimal. We do have quite a collection of moochers and bums, but that is no one's responsibility but their own.'
'What would stop welfare recipients from becoming working, productive members of society when their taxpayer-looted dole is cut off? Nothing but sheer laziness and a continued desire to remain parasites, in defiance of reality'
etc.
No. The management's 'job' is to maximize return on capital. Corporations keep staff happy only insofar as an employee's competitive worth dictates. If a survey were taken, what percentage do you think would agree their boss's job is to keep them happy?
It is the Christ story darkly recast as a parable of mankind's urge towards hierarchy and domination, realized through the fetishes of capitalism, religion, and technocracy.
The poor and dispossessed brothers represent mankind's thirst for freedom, for opposition and resistance. They symbolically kill Darwin, the story's central power figure and the main avatar of the hegemonic singularity. Yet they do so in an attempt to erase the boundaries between themselves and that oppressive structure. Darwin, whose domination of humanity has rendered him godlike, grants them their wish and transforms them into the insipid tourist children they wish to become. In the end, their struggle for justice and self-determination has come to nothing, and they go, indistinguishable from the other siblings, for ice cream.
You should also consider its similarity to the 1975 short story 'Let's go to Golgotha'
The writing off mass injustice and suffering as 'semantics' notwithstanding, you might enjoy learning that 'parasite' described those in Greek and Roman society who earned their daily meals by entertaining and flattering at the dinner tables of the rich
Hopefully you appreciate the irony in the word now describing those forced to live in incarceration, to satisfy a societal elite with a fetish for moralizing and punishment
Blaming those ground under the heel of the US Justice system for being forcibly made into "parasites" is almost as repugnant as encouraging our youth to side with the oppressors instead of the oppressed
Interesting question. In the developed world, the last three decades seem to have only entrenched class power and moved us further from a post-monetary society; however there are many encouraging developments in the periphery that could bear much fruit over the next quarter century. History, as always, will be written from the future.
'First, in our system "underprivileged" people essentially do not exist. The percentage of people genuinely unable to support themselves is infintesimal. We do have quite a collection of moochers and bums, but that is no one's responsibility but their own.' 'What would stop welfare recipients from becoming working, productive members of society when their taxpayer-looted dole is cut off? Nothing but sheer laziness and a continued desire to remain parasites, in defiance of reality' etc.