You’re more forgiving of her than I am. She could not bring herself to contemplate that the rights “innate in man’s being” were either a completely arbitrary construct possessed of only whatever moral authority Man gave them, or they were divinely vouchsafed us by some Being greater than ourselves.
Nevertheless, in elevating Man to the status of self-Creator, she prescribed a philosophy that gave no man power over any other ...the ultimate in human-centric liberty.
You’d still need some meta-being in the picture to be an enforcer of the “oughts.”
In the end it looks like yet another lame attempt to help God.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad most conservatives recognize the contribution Ayn Rand gave to the philosophical justification of individual rights but I’ve read all her books. What you said she could not bring herself to contemplate was central to her argument. It’s hard to sum up her work in one quote but I’ve found one:
“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A, and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.”
Whatever you think of mans origin, our purpose...at least in part...is to live here, on earth. In order to best do that, certain objective conditions to protect the individual must exist and it is up to us as a society to enforce them. That’s her basic message and it’s a very Christian one as well. The only claim her supposed ‘liberty loving’ christian detractors have is that it wasn’t meant to be. And as Whittaker Chambers that pisses some of them off.