Very well stated.
The obsessive devotion that libertarians (and even some who consider themselves conservative) have to Ayn Rand is very disturbing. She was a devout atheist whose worldview was based on 100% selfishness and any hint of altruism was to be abhorred.
When "Atlas Shrugged" was first published, Whittaker Chambers wrote a fantastic review of it in "National Review" (back when National Review actually was conservative) where he writes:
Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc., etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.
Far too many Christians are blind to how truly dangerous libertarianism is.
So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character traces in the dirt, "over the desolate earth,” the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the “mysticism of mind” and the “mysticism of muscle”).
That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which “has resolved personal worth into exchange value,” “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash-payment.” The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1,168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: “And I mean it.” But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired “naked self-interest” (in its time and place), and for much the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment.
The above quoted from Whittaker Chamber's 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged, "Big Sister Is Watching You," from the link you provided. Thank you so much, wagglebee!
Chambers also noted this about Rand's strange monomania:
"[E]verything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to [a] most primitive story known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures."
With Ms. Rand, everything supervenes on a concept of man as the only locus or bearer of "rights." Randian man has no social context whatsoever. He is a complete abstraction: For people do not live in isolation; they live in communities, societies. And it seems to me that societies have "rights," too — those that conduce to the public good, a/k/a the general well-being and civil order of the human community.
But Rand could never accept any idea of the public good as such. For that might entail a limit on the rights of her cherished "Children of Light." Certainly, she never articulated any such notion.
I just regard her as a nutcase. It is risible to me that Libertarians seem to regard her as some kind of secular saint — and prophet.
I believe that the root of her disordered and unbalanced thinking is her rejection of the Logos — rejection of Christ's Cross....
She is an atheist's wet dream.... (Please forgive my crude way of putting it.)
JMHO FWIW.
Thank you again, dear wagglebee, for the link to Chambers' meticulous and insightful analysis of a psychiatric case.