> Your entire chain of argument sounds religious in nature, It's not. You make the mistake of equating or asssociating morality with religion. I'm an atheist,

> Your entire chain of argument sounds religious in nature, It's not. You make the mistake of equating or asssociating morality with religion. I'm an atheist, and I think that ethics is a science. Applying the same metaphysical and epistemological foundations that give rise to science to ethics (and politics and art by extension) is what I'm advocating. > and at no point did it touch at all on why anything having to do with rights would affect economic output in any way. Yes, and this was intentional. The principle that underlies individual rights is not that it gives rise to increased economic output! (Although it does, this is not essential.) There are plenty of voices out there that will tell you all about the economics of capitalism (AEI, Cato, etc.) But that can't work because economics is not a fundamental field because any economic statement, no matter how trivial, subsumes a great number of concepts. Altruism (a pernicious legacy of Christianity, and before that, ancient Egypt) dominates ethics in the West. It is an awful, irrational and anti-life doctrine, but it will trump economics every time, because ethics is more fundamental in an individual's life than economics is. The only proper way to deal with altruism is to name it, and fight it on principle. You can't do that by talking primarily about economics.