There was no way Rapture should have failed the way it did: 1. In times when most people are "artists, poets, scientists, tennis players, not janitors or laborers" the scarcity of manual labor would inflate it's market value, giving them more leverage to negotiate higher wages and better conditions. Plot hinges on this, because the fishermen joined up with Fontaine's smuggling operation out of economic desperation, and he desperately needed their submarines and manpower. 2. in a world where "ever man in entitled to the sweat of his brow", Intellectual property would not have been recognized, neither would have corporate personhood, the first because it violates the ownership of physical property, and the second because it violates the principle of personal responsibility, a lot of the plot relies on Fontaine making a fortune out of "patenting genes and nucleotide sequences", it was patents that were not only a source of Fontaine's profits, but played a key role in the plot at other occasions as well. Corporation also is something the plot hinges upon, and people like Fontaine or Ryan would have been behind bars very early in the story had they not been able to use their corporate empires as shields for legal accountability for their actions. Ken Levine must have done a lot of research into objectivism and libertatian ideologies in making this, why would he have failed to realize that most of these types of people reject intellectual property and incorporation? 3. Concepts relating to libertarian ideals are very deontological in nature, and this includes the importance of consent being meaningful, Consent is determined to not be meaningful if achieved by way of deception or without it being informed, this is why even in a minarchist society like Rapture, fraud would exist ((as would restrictions that take human brain development and human brain conditions into account, laws against having sex with kids and people who are heavily intoxicated), there is both deception and lack of informed consent being used in Rapture, for example, they advertise "fresh hair" as being "100% safe", but it gives you cancer, so that is a lie, consent by way of deception, a very prosecutable one at that, secondly, we are told that the first customers of ADAM were not informed of the negative side-effects before they were sold it, this is also illegal, it's uninformed consent. I know of no voluntaryist ideology that would legally permit such practices,, and, with Ryan looking for an excuse to have Fontaine arrested, her is his charge that would have him in jail immediately after he sold the first bottle of the stuff, remember, we can prove he was failing to inform his customers and lying to them because the patents of the stuff are in his name, even without patents, he would have a hard time trying to prove that he had no clue about the full extent of the consequences of using ADAM, the best thing he would be able to do is shift the blame to Tenenbaum instead and get her arrested, then he'd not be able to dupe the people of Rapture into injecting his horror-juice anymore, as he'd be required to disclose everything and not be permitted to lie about it's long-term effects. For a drug parallel, look at the tobacco and alcohol industries. 4. Tenenbaum calls ADAM a good product from a business perspective because the resurrected/modified cells created by it's use replicate poorly, and so more of it has to be used to repair the defective cells, which means more defective cells are created when those replicate poorly, it results in body-wide outbreaks of cancer, which disfigures, their customers, drives them homicidally insane, and kills them unless they keep using more and more of it, she think this is good thing for a businessman because it means the customers are essentially forced to keep using greater amounts of the product in order to stay alive, actually this is disastrous for a business model because it prevents the creation of new customers, and kills off the ones you have rather quickly. Comparisons are made between this and drugs, but the comparison is not fair, while drugs can be addictive and deadly, most of the customers they sell to are not going to become hopeless addicts or suffer significant health problems, even for the hard drugs, these industries rely mostly on casual recreational users and the large majority are not going to show a noticeable degree of health failings associated with the drug, there's a reason that the drug market is mostly focused on these types of "sweet spot" drugs that aren't just going to make addicts and junkies who die in the streets. With ADAM, everyone who uses it gets dependent on it and is fated to die of its effects rather quickly, furthermore, unlike most drugs, whose negative effects may be subtle, the effects of ADAM are prominently visible and very disturbing to witness, lastly, when people see some miraculous new product, it's not a black friday styled all in right off the bat, usually there are a small portion of initial customers that would go first, followed by a slightly larger crowd, and so on, and there would always be a significant number of the population that would abstain entirely from even the most popular items on the market, a vision of the city being a place where the only people who did not use it were those privy to the negative effects of it's usage (Fontaine, Tenenbaum, Ryan), is making a case for a unique market occurrence, even assuming maximum appeal for the product, there should be a majority who are not ADAM users. Later its revealed that the cue for this problem had been discovered soon after ADAM was invented, and Fontaine patented it and withheld it because the profits from a customer that was dependent on ADAM to survive were so great, but the fact is that a really business savvy mind would actually sell the cure or improved product instead, as the short term profits from a dying customer are offset by far by the potential customers they scare away and also by the death of the existing customer, who is no longer able to buy the product, it's a failing business model that the cure fixes, rather than a successful one that the cure threatens. 5. Rapture is isolationist, but not nationalist, for some reason, despite being an invite-only colony that is exclusively reserved for the most successful people on the planet, it's full of all manner of human races, I highly doubt that blacks would be invited to board the founding "cruise" in the middle of the 1930's, the most recent ideologies in libertarianism, like National Capitalism, take the National Socialist approach to interactions across borders between peoples of different countries (immigration, trade, tourism, aid, international anything, military policy, etc.), while keeping a Minarchist Night-Watchman State policy on interactions within borders between people of the same country (everything else), often on a belief of "negative eugenics" where White Males would thrive under a truly minimal state so long as other countries can't interfere with them. Some would go even further and give White (defined as non-hispanic, and gentile) Males (defined by the possession of a Y-chromosome) a special status in such a society, and those closer to them (Male or White) given a higher status than those further from them (Female and Pox). 6. Well, Ryan himself is a Jew, modelled after Ayn Rand, he was a member of a Jewish family that fled Russia after they were declared enemies of the people, and were very bitter at that experience, instead investing themselves in promoting a personal and political philosophy (religion) around doing the exact opposite of what the people in the USSR were doing. Essentially an "anti-communism" ideology that loves everything the other hates, and does everything the other forbids, even where they agree, such as atheism, they do so in such a polar opposite way from one another that it could barely be called the same thing, one is Marxist (focused on rejecting reason as "capitalist" due to it's questioning and divisive nature), the other Nietzschean (where reason in embraced, because it drives one to "capitalist" things like personal struggle and seeing oneself in contrast to the rest of their nation's people).