I can understand. I accept Ayn Rand for her views on everything but God.
I reject her Atheism. Well, that, and the way she beats some things to death in literary sense.
But I wholly embrace her objectivism. I know. That is hard to do in the face of my Christian beliefs.
It is a hard circle for me to square, in the same way I can’t square the circle that is George Orwell’s views on Socialism.
I just have to live, in both cases, with the dichotomy.
You have found THE MOST COMMO GROUND.
Very astute of you, because I agree with you and more people should SEE IT THAT WAY.
Objectivism is generally not well-respected by other philosophers, which is something Brook mentioned in his article. I guess some philosopher got upset and had it removed. There is, however, an article on Ayn Rand where they discuss objectivism.
Here is a link to Chambers's review of Atlas Shrugged. He does get pretty tough on her:
One of his main criticisms is that her philosophy is too simplistic and black-and-white. I used to be a libertarian, but I've come to believe that libertarianism is actually more utopian than even communism and so is a false hope.
At least the communists realized that people aren't made for a communist "utopia" and so there had to be a period they referred to as "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which they would supposedly transform humans into the sort that would be able to live in an anarcho-syndicalist wonderland.
A "dictatorship of the non-entrepreneurial" would just not fly with libertarians and their NAP, so there would never be a critical mass of people who would want to, or be equipped to, thrive in a libertarian world.
Instead we get libertarian half-measures like tax cuts without budget cuts, lax immigration policy without elimination of welfare, or a free market in political candidates that leads to a monopolization of lawmaking by wealthy corporations who use their lobbying power to restrict markets in their favor.