Thank you - your article is insightful and effectively neutral, bringing forth counterpoint after counterpoint without seemingly interjecting it with your own deep beliefs. Its good to look at a philosophy as a whole and not cherry pick the specific items that you agree or disagree with to render judgment on the whole. The people who described themselves as Libertarians I have found generally adapt the individualistic benefits - anti-taxation, reduction or elimination of governmental oversight and regulation, property rights, etc... without needing to learn or deal with the more abhorrent and anti-social, anti-community aspects of the details that make up each of those specific areas of personal self interest.

The challenge is really to balance the selfish self preservation and essentially capitalistic nature of this ethical model, philosophy, whatever... balance it with the need for a communal set of rules and regulations that ensure each person is able to engage in the "pursuit of life, liberty and the American Dream" of prosperity. It is no coincidence that when taxes and regulations enforced means based assessments, and government sponsored infrastructure improvements through that taxation, that this period was when the American economy was at its' most prosperous and balanced from top to bottom. Infrastructure that ensured effective movement of raw materials to factories and then movement of products to retail or to be shipped abroad - those that believe this to be coincidental are purposefully burying their heads in the sand or putting on blinders and shades to insist this was circumstantial.

Personally, I believe that the communication from all sides of this fight, including the Left and Right, is flawed. If everyone would see our shared prosperity as an organism - that the interdependencies up and down the affluence ladder affect the overall prosperity of everyone - then maybe some of these questions of individual property rights and Rand's assertion that "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute" is directly affected proportionally by how happy and prosperous the community is.

If you are exclusively concerned for your own property and wealth such that you maximize your accumulative potential solely as a selfish pursuit, you will eventually suffer for it. Without a prosperous consumer society, the economy crashes and your wealth is worthless when there is nothing to buy or achieve. Maximizing your reward to the exclusion of achieving balance for everyone is in the end destructive to the goals of capitalism, like the ouroboros the head fully consumes itself and the entity ceases to exist.