Jonathan Chait has a really great take down of Ayn Rand over at The New Republic.  You all should go read it.

Sample:

For conservatives, the causal connection between virtue and success is not merely ideological, it is also deeply personal. It forms the basis of their admiration of themselves. If you ask a rich person whether he ascribes his success to good fortune or his own merit, the answer will probably tell you whether that person inhabits the economic left or the economic right. Rand held up her own meteoric rise from penniless immigrant to wealthy author as a case study of the individualist ethos. “No one helped me,” she wrote, “nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me.”

But this was false. Rand spent her first months in this country subsisting on loans from relatives in Chicago, which she promised to repay lavishly when she struck it rich. (She reneged, never speaking to her Chicago family again.) She also enjoyed the great fortune of breaking into Hollywood at the moment it was exploding in size, and of bumping into DeMille. Many writers equal to her in their talents never got the chance to develop their abilities. That was not because they were bad or delinquent people. They were merely the victims of the commonplace phenomenon that Bernard Williams described as “moral luck.”

Not surprisingly, the argument that getting rich often entails a great deal of luck tends to drive conservatives to apoplexy. This spring the Cornell economist Robert Frank, writing in The New York Times, made the seemingly banal point that luck, in addition to talent and hard work, usually plays a role in an individual’s success. Frank’s blasphemy earned him an invitation on Fox News, where he would play the role of the loony liberal spitting in the face of middle-class values. The interview offers a remarkable testament to the belligerence with which conservatives cling to the mythology of heroic capitalist individualism. As the Fox host, Stuart Varney, restated Frank’s outrageous claims, a voice in the studio can actually be heard laughing off-camera. Varney treated Frank’s argument with total incredulity, offering up ripostes such as “That’s outrageous! That is outrageous!” and “That’s nonsense! That is nonsense!” Turning the topic to his own inspiring rags-to-riches tale, Varney asked: “Do you know what risk is involved in trying to work for a major American network with a British accent?”

For me, the rampant Randism that permeates the Republican Party is the most aggravating aspect.  I can dismiss the tenthers, birthers, and wingnut evangelicals as just people who just don’t get it.  The problem with Randism is that it seduces the rich and powerful by stroking their egos, which can cause much, much bigger problems.

It’s one thing to have 30,000 people show up to wave crazy signs at a tea party protest.  It’s quite another to have nearly every powerful business manager devoted to an ideology that does nothing to advance the causes of the middle class, and does everything to further entrench runaway income inequality.  This is a philosophy that creates a morally triumphant rationale for stepping on the masses, for smacking away the outstretched hand of the less fortunate.  A philosophy that glorifies the massive compilation of wealth as the only way to prove yourself to society.

The thing is, as much as I find most of this morally repugnant, that’s not the reason it’s so dangerous.  It’s so dangerous because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t create more economic growth.  It doesn’t create a more stable society.  It doesn’t lead to more personal freedom.  It leads to booms and busts.  It leads to inequality and crime.  It leads to riots and crackdowns.

These are the reasons that this ideology must be stopped.  Because a better America does not spring from the Blackberry of the CEO, it is born from hard work and prosperity of the middle class.