Reidy

The original question mixes two quite different issues.  If your potential customer is incompetent - psychiatrically impaired (your example), underage, brain-damaged - then taking his money in a deal he isn't qualified to make is reprehensible whether or not you're matching the best available price.  Such a deal is unlikely to stand up legally, and this customer's parent or custodian should have been paying attention.
 
Without this special circumstance, your customer was free to shop around.  Instead he outsourced the job to you.  Economics calls this practice (charging different prices in different circumstances) with the concept of elasticity of demand.  The shopper who spends hours a day searching newspapers, junk mail and the web looking for bargains will probably spend less money than the shopper who decides he has better things to do with his time.  A flight from one airport to another is the "same" product if you buy it a month in advance to fly in February as if you buy it two days in advance to fly in the week before Christmas, but you pay much more for the latter.  A restaurant may sell a given meal at any hour, but it's more expensive at night than at lunchtime.  And so on.  Value is a relational term.  It's value to a particular buyer in a particular set of circumstances, not an intrinsic property of the good or service.

The claim under examination is either trivial or false.  To say that the universe is itself is to take the first alternative.  If you could show that there are two, then the two of them together would be the universe, and what you were looking at first is not the universe.
 
To say that the universe is a particular entity simply because "the universe", "existence", "being" and the like function gramatically like the names of entities, is false and gets you into philosophical trouble: where in space does it end? when in time did it begin? (most notoriously) what cause brought it about?   Such quandaries vanish when you give this supposition up.

I chimed in yesterday that metaphysical rebellion as #3 explains it is characteristic of Rand's villains.  They are in full revolt against one fact about the human condition: the necessity to make a deliberate effort to think and to act on the results.
 
(I thought that Rand was the only one who used "metaphysical" this way, but apparently Camus does too.  Some authors use "existential" to mean the same.)
 
((How metaphysical rebellion applies to clothes in an intriguing speculation.  No head openings.  Three legs.  Two right shoes.  Wrong for the weather.  Bras for men and jockstraps for women.))

I chimed in yesterday that metaphysical rebellion as #3 explains it is characteristic of Rand's villains.  They are in full revolt against one fact about the human condition: the necessity to make a deliberate effort to think and to act on the results.
 
(I thought that Rand was the only one who used "metaphysical" this way, but apparently Camus does too.  Some authors use "existential" to mean the same.)
 
((How metaphysical rebellion applies to clothes in an intriguing speculation.  No head openings.  Three legs.  Two right shoes.  Wrong for the weather.  Bras for men and jockstraps for women.))

I chimed in yesterday that metaphysical rebellion as #3 explains it is characteristic of Rand's villains.  They are in full revolt against one fact about the human condition: the necessity to make a deliberate effort to think and to act on the results.
 
(I thought that Rand was the only one who used "metaphysical" this way, but apparently Camus does too.  Some authors use "existential" to mean the same.)
 
((How metaphysical rebellion applies to clothes in an intriguing speculation.  No head openings.  Three legs.  Two right shoes.  Wrong for the weather.  Bras for men and jockstraps for women.))

I chimed in yesterday that metaphysical rebellion as #3 explains it is characteristic of Rand's villains.  They are in full revolt against one fact about the human condition: the necessity to make a deliberate effort to think and to act on the results.
 
(I thought that Rand was the only one who used "metaphysical" this way, but apparently Camus does too.  Some authors use "existential" to mean the same.)
 
((How metaphysical rebellion applies to clothes in an intriguing speculation.  No head openings.  Three legs.  Two right shoes.  Wrong for the weather.  Bras for men and jockstraps for women.))

I see a serious equivocation here.  In "A is A", A is a variable ranging over objects.  In "If A then not A", it ranges over statements.  You can't expect one of these to tell you much about the other.
 
I also see a misreading.  "A is A" means that an object is itself. It does not mean what you say it means in #11.  Any problems you might raise are the result of these two confusions.

It's new to me, too.  Thomas Sowell pointed out somewhere that whenever individuals, minorities or entire nations (19th-century Japan is his example) have striven successfully to catch up with some role model, they have done whatever they could to emulate that role model: learn the language, read the books, wear the clothes and generally acquire the ethos.  Thus, he observed, we can expect programs like this one, promoting cultural separatism, to fail, as in fact they have.

Income inequality regularly shows up in polls (Here's one.  Here's another.) as one of the issues least important to voters, down there with global warming.  Anyone but a Democrat should be praying that the Democrats play it up in the next election.

If the desire to change one's sex is innate, as some claim, I'd expect to see some genetic or physiological marker, common to transsexuals and nobody else or to transsexuals and the sex they want to acquire but not the sex they were born into.  Has anybody found such a marker?

One might argue that her having married him creates a presumption of consent and that we have no refusal from her that would overcome that presumption.

One might argue that her having married him creates a presumption of consent and that we have no refusal from her that would overcome that presumption.

You don't need unanimous or even majority agreement to move events.  You have to work your influence in particular and deliberate ways, though, and to do this in turn you have to identify who's worth persuading.
 
I still post here on OO with some regularity.  Does that exclude me from the rational and virtuous?  Do you exclude everybody who contributes to this thread?

Thank you for the tip.
 
Enigma (2001)  treated the same story with the names changed.  It turned the Turing character into a heterosexual and gave him a love interest presumably modeled on Joan Clarke.

(Coming late to the conversation)
 
This may not qualify as rhetoric (techniques of persuasion), but I've noted a pattern in Rand's imagery.  When she wants the reader's approval she uses imagery of hard or bright objects: stone; polished, highly reflective metal; ice; bright light.  Where we are to disapprove: clouds; fog;melting ice cream.
 
Another device is frequent allusion to logic and frequent citation of "A is A".  The residuum is a feeling that disagreeing with Rand is as patently unreasonable as disagreeing with the law of identity or with the rules of deduction - even where she doesn't give anything close to a premise-and-conclusion argument herself.

Greenspan's "The Attacks on Integrity" (in CUI) argued that government licensing makes these unfortunate stories likelier.  Occupational licensing, safety certification and the like become an automatic grant of credibility and reputation that practitioners couldn't have earned in a free market.

Bienvenue à Objectivisme EnLigne et meilleurs voeux pour vos études de ces idees. On s'intéresse d'Objectivisme à France? À Scandinavie?

To unhijack:

I wouldn't trust the UN's criteria. A good, neutral indicator would be immigration: how badly do people want to live in a country? By that measure I believe the US is first, followed by England, Canada and Australia.

When Nixon imposed wage-price controls in 1971, Rand said they were here to stay because they are politically impossible to remove.  This turned out not to be true.

Rand had a mixed record in this respect.  She knew the workings and consequences of a mixed economy better sixty years ago than most people do today.  Ellis Wyatt invented fracking.  New York city had its first major power failure in 1965.  Remarkably topical for 2014 is this from "The Student 'Rebellion'" in 1965:
 
 
In fact the whole, long essay is worth reading in connection with the news in 2014.
 
This wasn't all prophecy; the petty corruptions and dislocations in the early part of Atlas Shrugged are just what Americans were living through as a result of wartime price controls.
 
She could be wrong, too, as a result of undue cultural pessimism.  One that I've mentioned in an earlier thread is in the second paragraph of "What is Capitalism?" (1965), wherein she claimed that the decadent state of the philosophy of science was about to lead to a shutdown of technological progress:
 
 
The proliferation of Peoples' States in Atlas Shrugged reflects the expectation, widespread enough in the early postwar years but obsolete by 1957, that the USSR was going to roll over western Europe.
 
Her 1959 intro to We the Living mentions America in 1975 as a (possible) instance of "any dictatorship, anywhere."  In the lead essay to Who is Ayn Rand? (1962), Branden sets Galt's speech, with the collapse that brought it about, "twelve years from tonight".  These are indications that they expected full-blown doom to have arrived forty years ago.  "Is Atlas Shrugging?" a year or two later found the decline well underway.  Greenspan, in the NBI era, had a reputation for alarming predictions of imminent banking blowouts, which even the faithful (correctly as things turned out) found hard to take.
 
I'm not convinced that she really foresaw the Reagan presidency.  She said, shortly after he became governor, that he showed promise and was worth watching.  Any governor of California gets some presidential buzz.  Even Schwarezenegger got it, despite his constitutional ineligibility (his popularity would suffice to push an amendment through).  Rand was speculating along with everybody else, and she came to oppose him by the time he started up a serious bid for the office.

Didactic message - "moral" if you will - ranks way down on the list of values I seek in a work of art.  Entertainment value, a combination of sense of life and technical excellence, is what most of us look for.
 
That said, Objectivism values beauty and romance.  Here are the most beautiful, romantic songs I know:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTa8U0Wa0q8
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIW_Ah0wg-w

Mr. Firehammer -
 
Is that a picture of Socrates?  In light of what you have to say about homosexuality I wouldn't expect you to use a dirty old pederast to present yourself to us.

Mr. Firehammer -
 
Is that a picture of Socrates?  In light of what you have to say about homosexuality I wouldn't expect you to use a dirty old pederast to present yourself to us.

Stick to railroading.  I don't see you as an academic.
 
Your contempt for gay people is surprising in light of your stated desire to fuck David Hume.  He's all yours - too old for my tastes and, to judge from portraits, not particularly pretty.

The long quote above tells us what Nietzsche meant, but it's no guarantee of what Rand meant. If she'd meant all of that, she would have quoted more and summarized the rest as an expression of her own belief. She thought it was a snappy phrase, and she added her own meaning and her own context, which is the rest of the article and pretty much everything she published in the last several years of her life.