spelwel

But Rand's point is not that only self-deception is immoral. Her point is that any form of pretense involves hitching your ride to unreality, so to speak. Now I also don't think you can lie to others without engaging in self-deception, but set that aside for now. According to Objectivism, you gain from dealing with others, not by plunder, but by trade. You trade value for value. Thus, you benefit the more rational, productive, and successful others are. Do you agree with that? If so, then how could deluding them be to your interests? And, in that case, what makes you think they're not deluding you?

The assumption behind your post seems to be that there is some separate argument altruists make for using government force to make others sacrifice. But what would such an argument appeal to? What standard? The point is that morality sets the standard for politics. If the good is self-sacrifice, if human beings are what Ayn Rand called sacrificial animals, then you have to have a social system that treats them as such. You could not say, "Men have a duty to selflessly serve others--so lets have a political system that leaves them free to pursue their own selfish interests."

I'll make one point that could perhaps be helpful to anyone trying to think these issues through: none of the arguments given name Objectivism's validation of honesty. That's not to say they aren't true, relevant, or important, but that they do not name the essence of the issue. Ayn Rand offers a philosophical defense of honesty. Her argument, which presupposes a rich context (particularly reason as man's means of survival, the need for principles, and the Objectivist metaphysics), runs in essence as follows: pretending the facts are other than they are doesn't change the facts, and so dishonesty cannot lead to values. Or, as she puts it in Galt's speech, "the unreal is unreal and can have no value." Of course, to validate that so that it stands as an inductive, first-handed truth in one's own mind takes a lot of work and raises a lot of tough questions. Indeed, some of the questions raised by this thread are worth discussing in more detail. But for the discussion to go anywhere, you need to be clear on what Rand's actual argument was.