Oh, all right, it’s OK to help tsunami victims, we guess…

While still decrying “the ugly hand of altruism,” the lunatics at the Ayn Rand Institute have grudgingly retracted the essay it released last week, “U.S. Should Not Help Tsunami Victims.”

Now mind you, these purveyors of institutionalized selfishness do not think that we should be sending aid:

It would be preferable to use the aid money for a legitimate function of government, such as to purchase needed military equipment and armor for our soldiers in Iraq, who are being asked to risk their lives to defend our freedom. It is likely, moreover, that the increase in aid offered by our government in the days after the disaster stemmed not from benevolence but from surrender to the altruists’ corrupt demand that the U.S. had not sacrificed enough.

However, they concede that of all the “government abuses” (you know, things like public education, health programs, and so on) that we should be fighting, altruism is not as evil as “government programs and agencies whose very purpose is to violate individual rights, such as into the antitrust division of the Justice Department, which persecutes successful businesses for out-competing other companies on a free market.”

The only justifiable punishment for these vicious cretins would be to force them to live in a world governed by their own policies.