Ayn Rand was nothing more than a bad novelist who produced monotonous, barely readable prose–I mean, seriously, she needed 90 pages to say, essentially, “always act as selfishly as possible.”
Her philosophy–essentially an argument for organizing society around individual selfishness–barely carries the intellectual heft of the stoned midnight discussions typical of college sophomores. She spent her life promoting this ideal mostly so she could go around doing as she pleased and hurting everyone she encountered without feeling guilty.
We should all consider enlightened self interest as we make our way through the world, but Rand’s notions of the supremacy of individual rights make no sense unless you live in a world where everyone makes exactly the same claims to justice and these claims never conflict.
She compounds the silliness by claiming the objective truth of this idea–as if the broad range of human social relations she experienced in her lifetime, including societal reaction to her sex life and extramarital affairs, gave her no hint that human values depend on interaction and discourse, not objective truths.
Except perhaps on planet Stoned Sophomore, where both Ayn Rand and John Galt lived.