Ping
"And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men."
Preposterous, yes, but that is precisely the point behind the sort of statism that posits man as a slave of his own creation, the state. Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom Rand drew one wing of her narrative, stated that in the absence of God as moral authority (his "God is dead") the result is either no moral authority - nihilism - or the rise of some other source of moral authority, his ubermenschen. Rand's case was that these had already arisen in the form of the Producers such as Reardon, Mulligan, Galt, and Dagny Taggart. The case of Rand's deadly enemies was that this ubermensch resided in the form of the state or the Party, not only in the form of moral authority but in the role of arbiter of all truth.
It was that last that made those political doctrines anathema to an individualist such as Rand, whose real philosophical roots were in Aristotle. And yet she drew back from Aristotle's conviction (Metaphysics, book V) that his own system of thought led ineluctably to the existence of God, his "Unmoved Mover". Rand made the connection between the two philosophies explicit in so naming the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged. For her that godhead needed to be moved to Man because God did not meet her criteria for proof.
For that reason I have disagreed with a mountain of criticism and her own claim that she was an atheist. Whatever label you choose to use, or misuse, hers can never be any better than an agnostic position if she is consistent to her system.