Selfishness as a Virtue Debunked

A decade ago when I made the sad yet practical decision to leave New Mexico for the lucrative .com jobs in New England, I was desperate for something to entertain me for what was sure to be a long, lonely drive across the country. I had no money in those days, and was driving a VW Jetta with 160 grand of history and no working CD player. What I did have was a ghetto blaster plugged into the cigarette lighter and sitting in the passenger seat out of which I could play cassettes. Now, I don't know if you've ever driven across the heartland, but it's really flat and long. Beautiful in its own way but also a bit monotonous and as different as it is to my normal, everyday life, there's only so much of it I could take before going a bit stir crazy.
For instance, I think I had listened to Billy Bragg & Wilco's Mermaid Avenue about 30 times before I hit Minnesota, rendering the album unlistenable for me to this day (although I do have fond memories of "California Stars").
Luckily, my NM roommate loaned me a book on tape: an unabridged version of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead, so I found myself listening to the uncompromising architectural misadventures of Mr. Roark as droned on through the corn fields of I-90 through South Dakota. What I heard was fascinating. Through melodramatic, soap-opera prose, Rand painted an absurdly unrealistic picture of morality. I had so many problems with her vision that I stopped and dug out my portable mini-cassette recorder - the one I used to record the people I interviewed when writing freelance journalism - and argued against what I was listening to as the farmlands rushed by outside the window.
It was a bit shocking because I knew a lot of people who had read - and liked! - either this or Atlas Shrugged in high school and college. I have to admit, some of her ideas are seductive, and the portrait of the lone wolf artist standing up for his beliefs against a vulgar and demeaning society is entrancing for those of us who cave beautiful images and ideas in our heads but just can't seem to express them... I took the book seriously for a good long time, but ultimately, Roark's integrity did nothing for me. He even demolishes his buildings all because he can’t stand a few small sacrifices. Guess he’s never heard of “found art”! Regardless, it’s not living in the real world and says nothing to me about my life.
I'm thinking off all of this because Harpers reviews a couple of Rand biographies this month, and Barry Ritholtz points us to a snarky takedown of her work and it's perplexing influence on many of the money makers and power brokers of today. As Barry sez:

The thing that struck me most was the lack of rigor in the arguments — it was more religion than logic, more wishful thinking than reality based observations of how humans actually behave.

Anyways, that’s probably more thought that she deserves. I did my time driving across South Dakota and Minnesota.