In "The Virtue of Selfishness", Rand claims that selfishness (which she defines as "concern with one's own interests") as the virtue from which all others spring.

Can you name one writer who is in denial about the existence of human selfishness? (I'm sure you're quite aware that both Marx and Engels wrote a great deal about human selfishness.)

> I can think about better ways of helping homeless people than by paying more in taxes,

Telling that you don't actually list any of them!

Take my friend Mielan then. He was an incredibly hard-working productive man until his mid-teens, when some latent mental illness came out from nowhere. We thought it was drugs, we thought it was a failed romance, but it was either schizophrenia or acute bipolarity (he still hasn't gotten a consistent diagnosis).

For the last decade, he's been living on the street, cycling between "presentable" and "gibbering madness". He desperately wants to work, and even gets jobs, and then comes in babbling about, "I'm going to be President of Manhattan!" (actual quote).

I personally have tried many times to help him, and the help lasts until the next cycle.

I am not a doctor. I have happily spent thousands of dollars helping him but in a free-market health system like America's, I could never afford to pay for ongoing treatment.

He's still alive. However, my friend Harry Essex went through much the same thing twenty years before. He ended up dying of hypothermia in the street, and none of his friends could save him.

Can you explain how Mielan or Harry could be helped without taxes?

If your argument is this: "People who care about others can help out others, and other people can keep their money", then you're talking on an effective tax from the compassionate to the sociopath - a pretty good description of the US for the last 40 years, and it hasn't actually worked.