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.
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.