Right so there’s a lot in there. Why don’t we try to capsulate it further into a single point or two and see if we can untangle it and make things more clearer. To Rand, humans are not “perfectible” in the sense you mean, e.g. Christian ethics holding something impossible to reach as the standard, then condemning men for failing to live up to it. Rather, to her, morality is based on man’s nature and thus a realistic ethics has to consist in behavior possible to man. Where no choice is even possible, morality cannot be said to apply. Thus to her, and most other virtue ethicists in history, perfection means something more like doing one’s best to act virtuously. It is something more like “moral ambitiousness.”
Now that we’ve rescued Rand from the charge of moral utopianism, there is the political aspect that I think you also get wrong in a few crucial ways. You seem to think that the goal of political organization is to get man to act in accordance with objectivist ethics, that this would require substantial regulation, and thus, even if it’s not utopian and impossible, it will be more than the minimal government that Rand envisioned.
Well hold on. The goal of political organization is to allow man to act morally, not to turn him into an objectivist, or even to make him moral. But more crucially, this isn’t possible through politics. Central to the objectivist conception of morality is independence and autonomy. In seeking one’s values, something that was foisted upon you through coercion cannot be of benefit to you. This is why Galt refuses to become dictator of America. He knows it’s pointless. Every person needs to pursue is his interests from his own point of view, and that is why the non-aggression principle of a capitalist society is designed to protect the marketplace of ideas, to allow people to pursue even conflicting values in search for what will benefit our lives. Since human nature is capable of both good and evil, a free society, by not establishing such a legitimated channel for theft and tyranny, discourages the criminal tendencies of human nature and encourages the peaceful and the voluntary. Thus liberty and the free market are necessary to discourage aggression and compulsion, and encourage the harmony and mutual benefit of voluntary interpersonal exchanges, economic, social, and cultural, etc.
But now we come to the heart of what I believe is a pretty common conflationism, especially among those on the left. You speak of “‘men of the mind’ such as robber barons” and, as my previous post point out, you fear that Rand assumes the rich and powerful elite will act ethically instead of rapaciously. But I think this is mistaken because it treats those undesirable features of actually existing and historical capitalism as though they constituted an objection to the free market. This view relies on believing the free market and corporatism are in fact one in the same, whereas those features you point out actually follow from governmetal privilege and, in many cases, the exact regulatory and interventionist measures you yourself (and other leftish inclined people) advocate.
The last point is in regards to your prescriptions. Since your goals seem to be somewhat appropriately anti-corporatist, rather than achieving them through free market means, you prefer to achieve them through broadly (though not what you consider an extreme or authoritarian) statist means. But if the corporate elite uses their wealth and influence to enhance their position in society, why would you expect increasing the power of government over society will do anything other than increase the ability of the wealthy and powerful elite that controls the government to increase their position of privilege. Isn’t that truly a naive view? What if those very same “left” goals could be achieved only through market means? Would that make you support the free market instead?
So how much legislation is necessary to ensure adherence to objectivist ethics? Well none, since that’s not even possible. But how much legislation is necessary to enforce private property rights? My view is that legislative law itself is unnecessary to protect private property rights. Regulation certainly isn’t necessary, and is designed for a different purpose. As far as regulatory agencies go, the FDA is a mass murdering organization that is responsible for countless deaths and should be dismantled completely (cf. Higgs). The EPA is useless, since the general law the protect private property is sufficient to combat pollution. But the EPA was designed not to do that, rather to protect large industries from pollution claims and smaller competition (cf. Coase, Rothbard, and Block.) In a similar vein, anti-trust was put over in the name of protecting the public against monopolistic firms, but actually was organized and passed through by these big businesses themselves, and used to smash each other with (cf. Kolko.) I implore you to look over some of the history of these things.