Your post essentially says the same thing. Altruism or money or “gifts” to people who did not have the mind to build upon it. As where selective charitable acts are often done as the giver observes some value in exchange for the charitable act. And the charity is given in proportion to the perceived value.
Altruism creates the evil kind of greed and selfishness. The kind that not only destroys the giver, but the receiver.
For Rand, it has always bothered me as her idea of self preservation is described as selfishness. I consider the example of Dagney when she first arrived in Galt’s Gulch. While they did tend to her wounds and injuries, she understood she needed to return value for value. Whether it was washing clothes or preparing meals, she knew she could not ‘freeload.’
Another example is during the depression when Mom would pay the lady down the road a dime to do the ironing. Sure Mom could have done that herself or she could have just given the lady the dime, but it was the exchange of the value of work that kept the self respect of all involved.
And so this is why I have such a difficult time with the concept of socialism and even our welfare system or unemployment system. I do view it as inherently evil as it rots the person from the inside and out into the culture.
None of us can make another man wealthy by charity/altruism, wealth is what one must do for himself. The American culture has been looted.
People adore dichotomies and polar opposites, such as “good and evil”. They are less comfortable with “gray areas” between dichotomies, that are like “sort of good” or “sort of evil”.
But people are generally uncomfortable with true neutrality, as it has little to hold on to, one way or another. Yet only from the state of neutrality can you hope to transcend the limitations of dichotomy, to find that which is beyond the dichotomy.
Some people can grasp the potential for neutrality, but fail because they try to force it before realizing that it is “powered by” the dichotomy. This is the failure of dialectic, the assumption that the poles of the dichotomy can be forced together to create “the best of both worlds”.
In practice, this just results in an imbalanced dichotomy, which must recover its balance before neutrality can start to be created.
This process can be thought of as a human machine of sorts, with the *use* of money as possibly lubricating the machine like oil. But it cannot change either the function of the machine, nor its mode of operation, nor does it power the machine.
The same could be said for alcohol, “the neutral spirit”.