> You can find this sort of opinion in the Ayn Rand book _Why Businessmen Need Philosophy_. You might want to read it, and make some effort to reply to its arguments, before dismissing it as wrong enough to dismissively insult in passing.
Like a lot of people here, I read Rand as a teenager. As a slightly older teenager, I concluded she was an extremist who I think would have hated living in the world that her philosophy would have led to had she been wholly successful (Hobbes' phrase "nasty, brutish, and short" comes to mind).
The point about business transactions being mutually valuable and societally value-add is generally (although not always) true, in my mind, but that doesn't eliminate the need for either government or philanthropy if one wants to live in a civil society.
Like a lot of people here, I read Rand as a teenager. As a slightly older teenager, I concluded she was an extremist who I think would have hated living in the world that her philosophy would have led to had she been wholly successful (Hobbes' phrase "nasty, brutish, and short" comes to mind).
The point about business transactions being mutually valuable and societally value-add is generally (although not always) true, in my mind, but that doesn't eliminate the need for either government or philanthropy if one wants to live in a civil society.
But, to each her own...