Your five premises are not exact descriptions of the baselines of objectivism, but let's go with them. If you think I'm wrong, then maybe you agree with opposing views:

1) Reality is whatever you can convince people it is. If you say it loud enough, and often enough, it's true.

2) Reason is a royal pain in the ass, and keeps us from doing what we want. It's only use is to help identify reality, and we already know what we think about reality. Go with the whims and emotions.

3) Moral principles are whatever I decide they are. Who are you to judge?

4) every person is the property of society--whoever the hell THAT is--and should be prepared to sacrifice himself when called upon. Whether he volunteers or not is irrelevant.

5) Socialism, the opposite of capitalism, is the only just social system. The fact that most pure socialist countries have been poverty-stricken wastelands, surrounded by guards, walls, mines, guns, and razor wire to keep their enslaved inhabitants from fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, should be ignored. See number 1.

...Understanding isn't really as simply objective as Tom wants to reduce concepts to. There is a hermeneutical process that both confuses and enriches our world view. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his thesis explaining how man's artificial language (words) requires the development of a natural language to understand what is being said.

Oh, come on. You HAVE to be a college professor to be able to spout this stuff. I give you ten points for dropping Wittgenstein into a conversation--a philosopher whose one great work, "Tractatus," had the singular feature of basically disproving itself and kicking philosophy in general out the window. Twenty points for using "hermeneutical" correctly in a sentence. I had to look that one up.

One of the reasons I enjoy reading Ayn Rand is that she wrote in English, and not in pedantic horse-patootese. Her view of the field of twentieth-century formal philosophy was less than flattering. In my opinion, if you can't say it in clear English, there probably isn't a real idea there.

Oh, that goes for you techies, too.