I want to add my vote for the two previous posts. I am a very good C programmer, and I still write low-level functions in C. But once I saw how C++ helps during design, development, maintenance, and reuse, I switched.
The benefit of C++ is productivity, in my opinion. No question there is a philosophical satisfaction from programming in a way that carves nature at its joints (object oriented), but even without that benefit, C++ when done correctly (and that in itself is a big caveat) makes an individual programmer, and an organization, more productive.
I still love C for its elegance and stark simplicity.