The reason Ann Rand is so quoted and revered in the conservative movement generally is that she hit the money with her observations of the evils of collectivism and statism. Unfortunately, she drew the wrong conclusions on how to respond to that with her damnation of all altruism and religion.
If you do that, and carry that idea through to its logical conclusion, then we make ourselves God. Does our life consist of nothing but more and more self-gain? If that is the case, we would never have children, or fall in love, or offer anyone else advice, or care, or comfort. Who wants to live in a world like that? I don’t mind helping the poor and the disadvantaged and those down on their luck. My problem is when the government does the helping, very badly, with my money, and for causes I don’t agree with!
The difficulty with Ann Rand is that though she had some good insights, you have to take the bad conclusions she came to as well. She certainly thought that anyway. Like most humanist philosophers, Ann was supremely arrogant and very self-centred. There were no half-measures with “objectivism”. You couldnt agree with some but reject other parts. As far as she was concerned that was worse than rejecting the whole proposal.
Actually, you're drawing the wrong conclusion about her conclusions on this. What you said in your statement is not exactly what she railed against. What she was against was the helping of other people who had no value of any kind to offer in return and it was up to the helper to determine what is of value to be returned by the person being helped.
For example, you've worked hard your whole life trying to build a life for yourself and support your family and two men come to you asking for help. The first man put himself through college, is raising a family, and was leading a productive life but happened to lose his job due to downsizing or outsourcing by his company, i.e. a normal man. The second man, throughout the course of his life, never sought to better himself and sat around all day whining about how unfair life is and how "the man" is keeping him down, i.e. a hippy. Think about it, who would you help? The man who would appreciate being helped and would work all the harder to not end up in that situation again or the man who would likely squander your "help" and move on to feed off the next person to offer him "help"?
The values she spoke about were not exclusively monetary values, but values of the appreciation of other peoples' values. People take her philosophy out of context too often without actually reading and fully comprehending the full meaning behind her work...
I don't think this problem is unique to Rand - there is a seeming philosophical paradox at the root of the human condition that philosophers have been struggling with forever. Freeper carcraft nailed it at post #59 when he said: "Man can not survive as an individual but society cannot progress with out individualism! I think God loves irony!"
Political philosophy basically squares off between these two positions - "man cannot survive as an individual" (left wing argument), versus "society cannot progress with out individualism" (right wing argument). The problem is in their separation - it's like listening to bones and flesh arguing whether the whole body should be one or the other. Rand noted, however, that the argument for bones to be turned into flesh was becoming extremely appealing. So, she emphasized the other side as hard as she could to fight the rise of collectivist power.
So I feel it's a matter of context - if your boat has a hole in it, nothing matters as much as fixing the hole. But once that's done, there are many other considerations. Rand was focused on a hole that people were (and still are) refusing to acknowledge as dangerous. So did (in his own way) Dostoyevsky and certainly Solzhenitsyn. Ultimately, fighting communism isn't the point of life. But if igorance about the deadliness of collectivism is still a threat, it's the hole in the boat that will sink you before you can get to anything else.