Yes! Also, diversity. Additionally, this country was founded on the protection of (political) minorities from the vagaries of bare majorities (or worse, pluralities).
You are correct, sir! Plus, her writing is boring and overwrought. I have a copy, though not signed. It remains almost entirely unread, because it's almost unreadable, because her prose sucks. Ditto for the Fountainhead, though that was almost get-throughable.
Communism was built from the ground up from Marx's works. By contrast, libertarianism is much deeper, more expansive, and older than Ayn Rand.
You need to hang out with more libertarians. No, wait, that would probably make you itch uncontrollably. Try talking to them. Rand != libertarianism. Some of her ideas about some things are incorporated into various flavors of the philosophy. She has her own philosophy and epistemology called Objectivism, to which some libertarians subscribe to a lesser or greater extent. She is considered, at times, a founding mother of modern libertarianism, because of those "some" things I mentioned. But then again, so is Rose Wilder Lane. So is Isabel Paterson. They all did not agree despite being adherents to similar ideas. Often, they disagreed sharply. Many branches of libertarianism eschew a lot of Rand. Many individual libertarians can and do leave a lot of her stuff aside. I don't know why I have to keep ********ing explaining this, but it seems to be a quarterly or so exercise.
In the post-industrial sense, that's a defensible argument, but there had been societies that were basically communist. First century Christians, for one, and early monastaries. I think Thomas More's imagined society in Utopia is communistic, and that was written in ... The early 1500s, IIRC.
No, we don't want @Q*bert Jones III around us, because as soon he finds something he dislikes about us he'll engage in violence. He's beyond help and should be shunned.
Well, I was responding to Q*bert, so...good job? (Seriously, I enjoyed the comparison and the trolling)
I wish I could get your little sister to shun me. (You should report this post because words are scary and you need authority to protect you, right?)
This I agree. Paraphrasing John Kenneth Galbraith, the modern libertarian is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
Even-handedness would entail including the concerns of all people, not just those in cities on the coasts. You think the concerns of people in Alaska and Miami are even remotely similar? What about LA and Detroit? NYC and Fargo? You want to devalue one in order to promote the other because, well, reasons?
Not really. You just want something other than what we have now. Regardless of how you change it, someone would be getting screwed.
Imagine two towns. One has a million people, the other one a hundred thousand. The leaders of the bigger town approach the leaders of the smaller town and propose that they form a union with one democratic government. The leaders of the smaller town are agreeable to the idea, on the condition that there are ways to mitigate the fact that the bigger town has a lot more people and thus is likely to dominate government. So, they come up with a system that is agreeable to all, and they agree to form a union. Two hundred years latter you come and say, "Our system is unfair to the bigger town, all votes should count as one". Do you think the people from the smaller town would accept your point of view?