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Thanks for your comments. It seems a lot of people rush to distinguish what they dont want to believe or be told when it is pointed out to them that Rand made a significant and original contribution, actually a towering contribution, to literature and philosophy.

Many are intimidated by her seeming confrontation with religion. Whatever value faith may have to humans and for humans, Rand, in essence only said it was not a source of knowledge nor likely to be a reliable guide to action. Where religion may at times be a useful guide to action it is not because of faith but because in some aspect the evolution of the particular religious doctrine was thought through by someone in a way that advanced civilisation. She did seem to say that throughout history religion has been used as a tool by tyrants to dominate and control. She did say that people who look to religion to give them knowledge and make decisions are abandoning their own power of reason, and unlikely to be happy with the outcome.

Others are uncomfortable, apparently, with her thinking through the superficial excuses most people operate on and going to root causes where altruism and human progress are fundamentally in conflict. Adam Smith did not say that CEO's should consider the effects of their action on their "stakeholders", which is a thinly disguised marxist perversion promoted by academics. Adam Smith pointed out that the net effect of 1000 greedy bastard business owner's, however much their personal motives were selfish, competing relatively freely in the marketplace, was to advance the human condition as a consequence of how economic behavior occurs if people are free to contract and own property.

Mostly though, as I predicted, any of these discussions of Rands work degenerates into posts by people who didnt want to do the work of really understanding the progression of her work, from an original but simplistic phase to the achievment and importance of AS which attempts to and comes close to explaining with precision the significance and meaning of all of the main aspects of her philosophy, which like Smith, offers a roadmap to significantly better civilisation. Interstingly, many dont want to be confronted with their resistence to the hard work of thinking. I am more impressed by critiscm of Rand by those who demonstrate they actually understand what she was saying and its significance, as opposed to those who skipped over Galts speech and never went back to see what he said and think about why Rand might have thought it important to include it.