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Whether school is compulsory does not depend on whether you as a teacher dislike the curriculum, but on whether the student is forced to go to school.

Exams are not an example of freedom of choice. On the contrary: they are an instrument of oppression.

That's not a real choice. For example, I had to choose between French and Latin, but I didn't have the choice to do neither and create a new alternative.

Compulsory schooling itself violates freedom of choice, as the student does not have the choice to stay at home and do something else with his time instead.

Although you can't force someone to think, you can create the conditions for them to force themselves to think.

That's exactly what school does.

So children already have freedom of thought? You originally said (#34) that children only have freedom of thought when their minds have reached a certain level of maturity; that this was the purpose of school in the first place. That doesn't fit together.

Expecting a child to keep his freedom of thought in the face of all that pressure is not realistic.

If freedom of choice is sufficiently restricted, freedom of thought is also restricted.

Anyone who is forced to spend hours every day dealing with topics they would otherwise not deal with has neither freedom of choice nor freedom of thought.

CrowBot99 writes:

In order for a military and police to be valid, it would need the consent of the governed […], but a hidden qualification is MOST of the governed, which is an exception to individual right of association.

And:

[Rand’s] conclusion, in essence, is that an individuals [sic] right to choose who defends them should be ignored for the sake of a collective good, which seems to me an exception to one of our shared principles.

It doesn’t. Not any more than it creates man’s rights. Whether an interaction is consensual is derived from the nature of the interaction itself.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Rand’s argument necessitates a single world government, which doesn’t fit with the objectivist notion that government should be limited.

In anticipation of this problem, different protection agencies would develop such rules and procedures, which could be publicly accessible for their customers to peruse.

Solving this problem is one of the main value propositions these agencies have to offer. Without a solution, people won’t give them money. So these agencies have an incentive to put their heads together and come up with common standards.

For novel situations where they don’t have an applicable standard yet, see the myth of the framework (#16).

Governments do wage wars against each other, but private arbitration services would be less inclined to do so because, unlike governments, they do not have an effectively infinite amount of extorted money (taxes), fiat money, and human lives to draw from.

A common libertarian argument is that governments already compete. They are already in a state of anarchy with each other, yet the world still works somehow, and states can and do have agreements and common standards (eg extradition rules).

Rand’s illustration is an instance of a mistake Karl Popper calls the myth of the framework: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/objectivism-vs-the-myth-of-the-framework

Libertarians such as David Friedman have explained how that situation could be resolved peaceably:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yo7vnXmVlw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PnkC7CNvyI

A monopoly on violence amplifies the risk of abuse.

There exist many legal variations between states of the US, eg with regard to wiretapping laws (single-party vs two-party-consent states), yet presumably that wouldn’t lead KodoKB to conclude that federalism is bad.

Since an objectivist government, by definition, cannot aggress upon its citizens, it cannot stop them from forming private arbitration services anyway. It has no way to enforce its monopoly. So an objectivist society would sooner or later turn into an ancap one anyway.

Even if it’s true that people need shared, objective legal standards for a society to function, that doesn’t mean government is the only way to supply such standards. (Logan Chipkin)

Private protection/arbitration agencies would actually be better than the governments described in #5 (the US and Chinese government, respectively). Consider how things would be different if these governments were not extorting their citizens for money, but instead had to rely on a value proposition to earn their money – that is, if they both operated like private arbitration agencies. Then both would prefer to have shared rules around intellectual property so their customers continue to give them money.

That sounds no worse than the current situation between the US and China, say. China protects Chinese companies violating US trademarks.

(There’s a common libertarian saying about how criticisms of libertarianism are usually just criticisms of the status quo.)

Common standards often emerge voluntarily because people prefer objectivity and wish to avoid arbitrariness.

Consider communications technology and the web. Competing phone companies agree on standards for underlying technology so their customers can call each other. Developers of web browsers adopt common standards for the web. Developers of operating systems follow shared, cross-OS standards (called POSIX).

These standards result in objectivity, and they emerged without government involvement. People develop and agree upon such standards voluntarily because of the benefits they offer: without them, there’d be chaos. People generally don’t like chaos.

The anarcho-capitalist stance: competing governments in a single territory would not only work but be superior to having a single government, a monopoly on violence.