You misunderstand Rand. The important thing about her philosophy is her ethics, her epistemology and her metaphysics. My opinion is that once this is understood, the contradictions you see cease to exist. (Specifically, non-aggression is a conclusion, and is not axiomatic.)
The political stuff is just a downstream consequence of a much deeper set of ideas. It's important, but politics is at the periphery of Objectivism (in that Objectivism has political implications, just like any other philosophy), far from the core.
No, I understand Rand pretty well, though admittedly not as well as I used to. Her ethics comes to a conclusion--non-aggression--that contradicts with her political conclusion--government. Axiomatic logical systems don't mean you can derive contradictory conclusions as long as one is further downstream than the other. (If you do, you have chosen contradictory axioms, which has problems, especially if you explicitly choose non-contradiction as an axiom!)
Not to mention, the logical path between Rand's axioms and the rest of Rand's philosophy goes through a thick layer of vague handwaving and unjustified assumptions.
Agreed, though the NAP is actually pretty good if you consider it more of a strategy, with consensuality being the thing you're trying to optimize for in human interactions.
"The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.
Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.
This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions."
"There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see “The Objectivist Ethics”).
If it is true that what I mean by “selfishness” is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man—a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice."
Yeah, and if you ever wake up, you'll realize that your own interests are enormously bound up with the interests of society at large.
You drove to work today on a public road or public transit, were kept safe by publicly funded police departments and most likely hold a knowledge-worker job that you're capable of doing in large part because of public education (probably).
But, yeah, you're a self-reliant rugged individualist. I get it.
Well, that's how things are right now, but that doesn't bother me as much as it used to. Rand's best quote on that is, "anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today."
Rand shows that the world doesn't have to be the way it is right now; she presents a logically consistent philosophy, which we can use to guide ourselves to much greater heights of achievement.
Communism's logically consistent. There are people who say that communism is actually a really good idea, Russia just implemented it poorly.
Can you see some parallels between that and the point you're trying to make?
In what world would it make sense to privatize, say, road building and make every road a toll road? It'd be even more of a mess than private health insurance. (EDIT: equivalent mess to the government producing toilet paper, if you'd rather)
Anytime you manage to neatly distill reality to the point where a simple sound byte is the solution to all of our extremely different problems, you've probably entered fantasy land.
Communism is not consistent with man's requirements for survival. (Unlike animals, man's essential and unique method of survival requires the use of his mind. For anyone that doubts that Communism deprived men of the full use of their minds, see the sordid history regarding Lysenkoism, or the way photocopiers were guarded behind bars in Soviet Russia.)
Objectivism holds that it is not enough to think about something in isolation to determine its validity. It is equally important to compare ideas with observable facts, and throw out those that are not factually supported as false. ("The true in theory is the successful in practice.")
Communism makes grandiose assertions about human nature in one direction, you're just making them in another. Capitalism is the better mode for most things, but in the real world we have nuance. Invoking Capital Letterisms generally doesn't solve any problems.
"For anyone that doubts that Capitalism deprives men of the full use of their minds, see the sordid history regarding tobacco, or the way copyrighted media is guarded behind centuries-long copyright terms and the DMCA in America."
Who are its rivals? Foreign governments? Or "citizens" who want to overthrow the government?
A fully legitimate government protects individual rights (as defined by Rand); foreign governments or local "revolutionaries" are the initiators of force if they attack such a government. Remember that they would be attacking an entity that does not take anything forcibly from anyone (as it would be funded by voluntary contract insurance sold for individual transactions), and exists only to arbitrate between disputes and protect individuals from being deprived of their property.
Governments come at the end of a very long process - people constantly evaluate, adopt and reject philosophical ideas. These ideas, whatever they may be, are the ultimate determinants of history, and they matter. It's not a given that governments will always grow more corrupt, or that they always need to expand unnecessarily. That those things have always happened to every government in the past is really a stain on the political repercussions of altruistic philosophy rather than men (as they could and should be) or the concept of a legitimate government.
Ideas matter. Anyone who wants to live happy, fulfilling life needs to take philosophy seriously. When a majority of the populace doesn't do this for a long stretch of time, tyranny results, no matter what the government or its laws may have been.
Let's imagine someone breaks into my neighbor's house, I round them up, give them a fair trial, and lock them up in my basement for a year. No different from what the actual government would do. Just like a legitimate government, I have not initiated force. At this point, two things would happen:
1. The government would initiate force against me to protect their own monopoly on the business of rounding up burglars, giving them a fair trial, and locking them up.
2. The government would let me continue unimpeded, at which point they relinquish their monopoly on the legitimate use of force and cease to be a government. They are simply one of many competing retributive justice agencies, and we have anarchy.
As you can see, Rand's philosophy is not "logically consistent"--it comes to vastly contradictory conclusions.
Trust me, unless you've got your asbestos longjohns on, this is not something you want to get into with Objectivists around. Especially so if you don't happen to be versed in Rand's particular redefinition of the word "selfish".
Though Rand's interest in the-thing-that-she-should-have-just-made-up-a-word-for actually makes aspects of her philosophy appealing to me. I just tend to think more in the terms of the everyman who shouldn't be crushed in the name of The People, rather than the Great Man. Great Men tend to fend for themselves very well...
The political stuff is just a downstream consequence of a much deeper set of ideas. It's important, but politics is at the periphery of Objectivism (in that Objectivism has political implications, just like any other philosophy), far from the core.