Perhaps not. Or perhaps not the whole truth.
You see, I do not want to stand idly by and let Ayn Rand be unfairly maligned. It is easy enough for her to be fairly maligned, after all. She was not perfect, nor was she perfectly wrong, or wrongly directed.
I prefer to think that she has offered us a service by attempting to establish a path of logic and reason, for those who may be uncomfortable with mere religious platitudes, for logical and well-intentioned people to live lives of purpose and productive endeavor, yielding at its end a life worth having lived and one of good repute.
"Enlightened self-interest" is not an empty concept; it is, after all, what guides our proper behavior when driving in traffic. You may wish, or hope, that your fellow citizens are of good Christian nature behind the wheel, but what really matters is that they realize that all are served when each behaves responsibly.
Ayn Rand was dealing with economics, in a state of simplification to its obvious natural truths. I do this myself. I picture an individual with a cart-load of straw, meeting up with someone who has a surfeit of mud. Each has more than he needs of his commodity, and is willing to exchange for something different which will offer him the capability of expanding his comfort by perhaps building a more sturdy and functional house. Nothing in this scenario involves Christian precepts or any other belief system; it is an economic issue made as basic as possible.
In this manner, Ayn Rand, and perhaps I, are attempting to illustrate that the world of humanity has many ways to arrange itself for mutual comfort and advancement, and not every interaction between strangers need devolve into coercion or conquest.
That’s kind of what I was trying to say, in a way. The basics of economic exchange are objective. Nobody has found a workable basic explanation for economics other than “free people maximizing their personal value through the exchange of scarce resources.”
However, it’s never done at the “physics” level of the natural exchange of less- for greater-valued goods. There is always the imposition of an absolute standard by someone.