You're doing what's typical for people trained in modern philosophy when debating online, i.e. complaining that I didn't write a full philosophical treatise in

You're doing what's typical for people trained in modern philosophy when debating online, i.e. complaining that I didn't write a full philosophical treatise in one comment. E.g., I didn't go into details of my view on Locke because they weren't central to my point. After I became an Objectivist, I did some research on Enlightenment thinkers precisely because people dismiss Objectivists for being ignorant of past philosophy, and what I found tallied with what I'd heard from well-informed Objectivists. Locke is an empiricist and holds that certain knowledge is generally impossible outside of areas like geometry. This skepticism subtly undermines any philosophy built on top of it; Rand's epistemology, in contrast, shows how certain knowledge can be possible (within a particular context), which gives her the framework to build an entire system of integrated principles, basing politics and aesthetics on ethics, and ethics on metaphysics and epistemology. Likewise, I didn't list what I think is novel in Rand's philosophy as I assumed honest readers could research it for themselves. Here's some: her solution to the is-ought problem, her solution to the problem of universals, her theory of the nature of romantic art, and, obviously, a complete moral code justified via rational self-interest. Locke and other writers did talk about the evils of force (and I often enjoy telling people that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was originally Locke's "life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness"). However, it was Rand who first coined the phrase "initiation of force", and Rand who first argued that reason and force were essentially the only two means of dealing with men, making non-initiation of force the fundamental social principle. (For said honest readers, the books which persuaded me were The Romantic Manifesto and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, though Virtue of Selfishness is probably the easiest starting point. Once I studied Nozick's famous criticism of Rand, I concluded that he was someone very smart making a deliberate attempt to misunderstand her argument, and I was pretty much soured permanently on 20th century analytic philosophy, "libertarian" or otherwise).