Far Far better of a conservative is Ludwig Von Mises who basically argued for the free market not from a natural rights approach but from the idea that socialists always would get the opposite of what they were aiming at because of problems of information, calculation and valuation. All his predictions about what would cause the systematic failure of communism came true and he made these back in the early 1920s when Russia had just had it's revolution. He didn't base his arguments on the idea that Communism is immoral, etc. He just said that it was broken in that it would fail miserably to accomplish it's ends for various systemic reasons that he explains in great detail. Go read "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" over at Mises.org and you will be amazed at his brilliance.
Well, just for the record, I am an admirer of von Mises, as well as Rand.
There's nothing wrong with a pragmatic indictment of Communism, per se. The trouble is that the pragmatic argument fails if they manage to hold things together (Mainland China comes to mind). Rand, OTOH, provides a powerful moral argument against Communism (or any form of totalitarianism) that is immune to the vulnerabilities of the pragmatic argument.
On balance, I think there's a great deal we can learn from both Rand AND von Mises.