Ayn Rand got a lot right, much more than anyone on the contemporary scene. From Jeffrey Tucker at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:
There is a tendency in the world of ideas to divide thinkers into saints and witches. Some are singled out for a hagiographic treatment. When others discover issues with their thoughts or lives, the switch is flipped and they become worthy of being burned. They are either valorized or demonized. This has happened to countless intellectuals: Voltaire, Jefferson, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and thousands more.
It’s all quite infantile. The better approach is one born of maturity. Read everything and everyone and learn what you can and toss out what’s wrong. Of course this requires work and thought. In fact, the saint/witch dichotomy is merely a mask for laziness. It’s a way of finding a fast track to truth that dispenses with the arduous task of actual research.
Few have been victimized by this habit as much as the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. People might encounter her work in high school and decide to adopt it as a personal credo, only to find out later in life that the world is more complicated than she describes and they turn against her.
This is all unfortunate. She was a singularly insightful intellectual from whom there is a vast amount to learn.
She had a mind of the incredible power, together with the literary skill, to CREATE a John Galt! She could not, however, BE a John Galt!
So what? She was, after all, one of us – a human being! She will, in the future, be recognized for properly defining mankind’s potential “humanity,” as she resides in the Patheon of humanity’s greatest benefactors. She did so by, as her philosophy exhibits, simply living her life!
As is said by so many that have digested her body of work, “she changed my life!”
I KNOW she did mine!
Dave