And yet, here you are replying here instead of replying to my "so called answer". If you are not happy with my answer, why not provide a number yourself.

There is a reason for the Ninth Amendment and it is more than establishing that the enumerated rights are not the only rights retained by the people, it also implies in declining to enumerate these other rights that they are too numerous to list.

One could distill, legislatively, law down to one act of legislation and have it effectively describe the law. That one act of legislation would be that no person anywhere at any time has the lawful authority to deny or disparage the rights of another. Any need or clarification is to appease the sophists.

The contradiction of the definition of selfishness is the not in question. Your so-called answer was as many as exist naturally. Well what is the number? Or how do we get to the number. I agree with your diatribe but that was not in any way moving toward an answer.

Criminals are people who deny or disparage the rights of some other person. They are the ones who victimize some person. This is the rational and reasonable way to define a criminal. Use irrational and unreasonable methods of defining a criminal and you wind up imprisoning more people per capita than any other industrialized nation in the world. Why would you defend that?

Of course, this is simply not true. I answered your initial question directly and you have declined thus far to speak to that instead sulking because I have challenged the effectiveness of using dictionaries to understand concepts such as law and selfishness. Particularly law! Why not look up the definition of objectivism and declare yourself informed?

You asked for a dialogue and now you are annoyed because you got one.

Criminals are people who disobey the "legislative acts" of the government that presides over the "country" they reside in.

If by "the question" you mean the one you initially asked, I answered that question, if you do not believe it was "constructive" enough then speak to that instead of expecting me to guess what it is you want as an answer. If you mean by "constructive" that dictionaries do this, then perhaps you need it explained to you that in The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand rejects - and rightly so - the dictionaries definition of selfishness. She does this because as it is defined it offers up a contradiction. Can you find the contradiction in the definition of selfishness as defined by modern lexicographers?

From your inference, the answer to my question is three. Correct? Or is it 10 or 613?

Thank you Rene' Margritte. You do like to see your words on paper don't you? Why don't you give me a useful answer or comment. So far you have done nothing but correct us.

Government cannot invent law, they can either obey it or disobey it just the same as any individual. What crime did John Galt commit? Who did he harm by refusing to produce? This is the question.

It could be argued that he caused all of "society" harm by not producing. Are you willing to make that argument?

Provide something more constructive to the question. That is a good place to start.

The hero's of Atlas Shrugged were considered to be criminals by the mystics, priest class sect of whimsy and arbitrariness. There is no such thing as a "non-objective laws", there are laws and there are legislative acts. Legislative acts can effectively describe law or disregard law, but an act of legislation is no more "law" than the map is the territory, the word is the thing defined and a picture of a pipe is a pipe.

Yes she was. Remember she stated so it "Atlas Shrugged". The government described in AS is exactly what the definition described. Ragnar, Readen, Galt all were criminals under that government. They of course were the hero's because of the horrors of collectivism.

In a system of non-objective laws, heroes are criminals. The strikers in Atlas Shrugged were all criminals in the novel, especially if they quit after Directove 10-289 was "passed."

Look up selfishness in the dictionary. Do you think that's a good place to start?

This definition is similar to sociologists definition of law, and sociologist Donald Black that is being taught in universities states that "all law is governmental social control". If you buy that I've got some prime real estate on Planet X you might be interested in.

Let's ask Mubarak what he thinks of "governmental social control".

By this definition you've provided, John Galt is a criminal. Do you honestly believe Ayn Rand was selling criminality as heroism?

Dictionaries are good places to start. If it is a system of rules is it always an axiomatic system? That would help define it's structure and how many law's or regulations are needed or possible. I think it can expand infinitely (help us!) but there is a fixed smallest quantity to optimum government. I may be wrong, hence the discussion.

According to the U.S. Government Printing Office there are more than 200,000 pages in the United States Code (USC) alone, then there is the Uniform Commercial Code and I have no idea how many pages span that Code.

The United States imprison more people per capita than any other industrialized nation in the world. That's more than China and more than the Soviet Union at the height of their tyranny. As of 2008 it was reported that there were 2.3 million people residing in American prisons, and Congress and state legislatures keep adding and adding legislation to their books and it has apparently not occurred to many legislatures that they have the authority to repeal as well as legislate.

The more acts of legislation added to the books the more insane the nation becomes. So many bogus acts of legislation exist on a federal, state, and local level that its sum effect has been that more and more people have no regard for the law. This lack of regard is not because of the law, but rather due to equating legislation with law.

The short answer to your question: "How many law's does one need to govern a free society?"

The answer is as many laws that exist naturally. The gross expansion of legislative acts is often justified as a method with dealing with new technologies, but these technologies did not come about because someone invented new laws of physics and technology obeys the laws of physics and when a just government is established and kept that way, so too do the acts of legislation enacted and enforced by that just government.

I think the dictionary gives a pretty good definition of law:

"The system of rules that a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and may enforce by the imposition of penalties"

Your post reminds me of a question I wish to have answered or at least get a opinion.

"How many law's does one need to govern a free society?

"Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

" Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?

"If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all."

~Frederic Bastiat - The Law~

Any legislative authority that prohibits the people government serves but allows government officials to act upon is not a lawful act, it is instead a whimsical and arbitrary declaration of authority that does not objectively exist. If people cannot steal it follows governments cannot either. If people cannot murder, it follows governments cannot either.