CompuServe Messages

First, you ignored my previous point about "loss leaders" as a valid, capitalistic concept for pushing other products. Most importantly, you are attempting to blur the distinction between politics and morality. Politics stem from morality but is quite different. To say a person "should not" attempt to kill himself, or take drugs, or be a slave to someone else, is not necessarily to say that the GOVERNMENT should stop the person from that action. Properly, a capitalist social system enforces individual rights, which means that if you want to cut your wrists, that fine by the government — if you want to shoot an innocent person, that is not. Ayn Rand fully treats the issue of ethics (which is just the third branch of philosophy, which rests on metaphysics and epistemology, the foundations). If life is the standard of value, then a person should live for his values, for the promotion of his/her life (and the rational values associated with their life, which includes other people such as one's wife and friends, to the extent one values (one's spouse being higher on the hierarchy of values than a casual friend, for example.)) So I reject your equation of morality with government force. I don't live rationally because someone forces me too. I do so to further my life — without sacrificing others to myself or myself to others, in the famous line of Rand's hero, John Galt.