I can't help noticing that you're quoting Rand at me as if it were scripture -- didn't you say that wasn't allowed? ;-)
Anyway, that particular passage is a logical train wreck.
Consider, for example, the following.
Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining one's life; psychologically, its result, reward and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness.
I'm sure that you, like most of us, have been made very happy by something completely unexpected -- say, a cool, sweet-smelling breeze during a lovely sunset. There is no way we can claim that that particular happiness resulted from the pursuit of rational goals. Thus, Rand's statement is incomplete. Happiness can result from other sources as well. If we accept that happiness is an objective good, then we must also confess Rand's rationalist approach does not fully and properly describe the source of happiness.
The statement is also incomplete in another way: there are things that make us happy precisely because they are not related to maintaining our lives. For example, I've found that watching a small child following ants can make me extraordinarily happy -- despite the fact that it is quite irrelevant to the maintenance of my own life.
And when one experiences the kind of pure happiness that is an end in itself -- the kind that makes one think: "This is worth living for" -- what one is greeting and affirming in emotional terms is the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself.
In other words, "what makes us happy is objectively good." The problem with this statement is that it's not objective, even for an individual. (After all, some of those suicide bombers were probably happy to get onto a crowded Jersualem bus -- yet you condemned them as evil....) It is difficult to accept logic that places a non-objective "highest moral good" a the pinnacle of an allegedly objective philosophy.
It also requires us to accept the claim that a thing cannot be good unless it makes us happy. Thus, we must exclude any moral imperative for which we might say, "this is worth dying for" -- after all, in Rand's world, the dead cannot be happy.
Let's stop here to define "objective." As Webster's puts it:
Objective ... b: of, relating to, or being an object , phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind
Let us assume that Rand's statement about happiness is really objective. Thus, because what makes me happy is an objective good, and watching a small child following ants has made me happy, it should make me happy, every time. And yet, just as a child's interest in ants can make me happy, it can also infuriate me if it delays my doing things related to the maintenance of my life. The same objective act has therefore evoked in me two diametrically opposed reactions. (And, of course, for it to be truly, truly objective requires us to extend the example to all people -- something we obviously cannot do.)
Thus we see that Rand's "statement of objective fact" is not objective after all.
Now, you and I undoubtedly agree that there are things which are truly good, and things which are truly evil -- and they'd be so even if you or I had never been born. This puts Ayn Rand in something of a hole: if good or evil exist independently of any given individual, then their source obviously cannot be the individual; rather, the source of good or evil must be elsewhere, and can only be discovered by individuals. Rand says that this source is "objective reality," but objective reality tells us that Rand's particular philosophy can at best be a relativist one.
I'm afraid you're simply going to have to admit one of two things: there are either no moral absolutes such as good or evil; or the definition of good and evil must be supplied to us from a supernatural source.
Good and evil have to do with life and the maintenance thereof. There is no such thing, for instance, as an evil rock.
-- and they'd be so even if you or I had never been born.
Not true.
The concepts of good and evil are relevant only to living things; they have no meaning whatsoever -- they are not "so -- to non-living (unborn or dead) things.
Good and evil do not exist independently of any living thing ... see post 107.