Imagine these responses to the graphic and ask: Are they cheap shots?
Lefty Take 1: “Sad about the poor Swiss, Germans, and Swedes – exploited by all those rich bastard billionaires!”
Lefty Take 2: “So happy that Moldova, Belarus, and Romania are safe from exploiting billionaire capitalists!”
There is more to life than economic hedonism. Those Eastern European countries might be willing to trade a lower “standard of living” in exchange for maintaining the integrity of their tribes and cultures, so that their native populations aren’t dispossessed by millions of alien derelicts from the world’s least competent places. Because, you see, man really flourishes as a tribal organism, despite Rand’s weird and hypocritical denial of the fact. And yet Objectivism is supposed to be an inductive philosophy based on the facts of man’s nature, except for the facts Rand arbitrarily decided to ignore.