Why did you drop the "or citizen" clause from your original statement?

It is not up to you to determine what others were born as. The only right you have to determine who is born as something is in regards to your own life. You have no right to tell other who cause no harm how to live their lives. Mind your own business.

Who's "we?"

Look, it's obvious you're only here in the gulch to satisfy your craving to belittle and destroy Rand, Objectivism, and let's face it, your hatred of man.

Oh, yes, buddy, it oozes out of your pores like sweat on a summer afternoon - your hatred of man, your belief that he's weak, sinful, incapable. That's the true premise you don't want to address. It's evident in everything you've professed - why you believe in the need to live for one another (because living for ourselves is just unthinkable, since we're just rotten animals), it's why you favor things like the soda law in New York, because such a weak, rotten creature like a human being cannot possibly choose his nutrition for himself.

This is why you are incapable of grasping even the most basic tenets of Objectivism; even in its most rudimentary explanation, it is a philosophy rested on the premise that man is basically good, capable of achieving greatness on his own and doesn't need anyone (but associates with others he wants to associate with and finds value in) and need not feel guilty for being human. It is this hatred of man, of all of his potential for greatness, of the limitless capactity to imagine and to create and to build - this is what you deride, this is what drives you nuts about Objectivists, and this is why you return here everyday and try to provoke conflict - you want to reinforce your worldview that man is wicked, rotten, fallible - and what better way to do that than to attack those who believe otherwise?

None of this is about your belief in "a greater good" or any other such nonsense. This is about your hatred of good, intelligent, capable men who dared to do something where others declared it impossible or unnecessary. You are the person Rand describes as being a type of the mediocrity that hisses and snarls at those who refuse to live in the sewers, who choose to reach the peak of the mountain. All of your defense of the "laborers" is nothing more than the cry of a mediocre, embittered soul who wants everyone else to be mediocre and unhappy as he is.

So forget about "the rules." It's not about them. It's about your philosophical premises that label man as a wretched creature unworthy of sunlight.