Maybe I should have said that it can easily be used to justify mean-spirited behavior. It seems to me to lend itself to that. Even Ayn Rand herself, when her own life fell apart, felt that people who rushed to support her with no thought of personal benefit to them were violating her philosophy, and she couldn't understand why they would act that way. (That's based partly on a very good bio-pic of her, I forget thename.)

I also have a pretty sociopathic relative (doesn't everyone?) who just adores Ayn Rand, because he claims to reject such middle-class, bourgois values as family loyalty or generosity. He's a natural taker, and he uses Ayn Rand's philosophy as his lodestar, or he used to anyway. He's been out of touch for many years -- even from his own children.

Her star characters are such pure individualists that they have no sense of being connected to the society, they live separate and isolated from most other people, except for their epic love affairs with each other, and her villains use values like "for the good of the society" to undermine and manipulate, and to sap the strength of her heros. I don't see the world that way at all. When I do volunteer work, or give blood, or donate things to charities, I don't feel sapped or drained or manipulated. She seemed to me to have absolute disdain for the idea of a cooperative model of society.