I really need to try to at least skim Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead. I've only read bits of the originals; the stupidity burned.
I think I was too old when I came across them, they need to be read in early adolescence.
I need to read them now because, like Intelligent Design and climate change denialism, they're a form of pseudo-rationalism with impressive cultural persistence. If I read them, I can join the rationalist counter-attack with a clean conscience.
In the meantime I can only point to Scott Aaronson's monster takedown: Shtetl-Optimized - The complement of Atlas Shrugged.
I can't recall such as smash job outside of the, well, the past 8 years of reviews of the Bush administration. Aaronson doesn't merely rend Randism, he burns the shreds in a plasma canon.
Number 3 is just one of 10 ...
... Family. Whittaker Chambers (of pumpkin patch fame) pointed out this startling omission in his review of 1957. The characters in Atlas mate often enough, but they never reproduce, or even discuss the possibility of reproduction (if only to take precautions against it). Also, the only family relationships portrayed at length are entirely negative in character: Rearden’s mother, brother, and wife are all contemptible collectivists who mooch off the great man even as they despise him, while Dagny’s brother Jim is the wretched prince of looters. Any Republicans seeking solace in Atlas should be warned: Ayn Rand is not your go-to philosopher for family values (much less “Judeo-Christian” ones).
If Rand had had to deal with the disability of childhood, injury, heredity or age her stark brutality would have been inescapable.
