With the lack of regulation leading to catastrophic failure of our "free market" system, in turn leading to calls for increased calls for regulation, it's no surprise that the virtues of Ayn Rand are being extolled once again. Although I have no problem with her as an author, or even as a philosopher, I do have a problem with taking her ideas out of historical context, and attributing to them a greater worth than I think they deserve.
    Ayn Rand's "selfishness as a virtue" is not a new idea. The Greek philosopher Thrasymachus voiced a similar idea, commonly translated as "injustice is virtue". From Matson's A History of Philosophy,

But far from saying that by nature all men are equal, they held that on the contrary men, like beasts, are naturally unequal, and what is natural is for every man to get what he can by any means. Law, morality, fair play, everything that the Greek summed up in the notion of "justice," is a conventional artificial obstacle that a clever man will circumvent-and be a better man, a more excellent, "virtuous" man, for doing it. "Injustice is virtue."

It is easier to understand this philosophy by knowing the history of Greek philosophy up to this point: several iterations of philosophers had attempt to separate the natural from the conventional, working from the basis that the natural is equivalent to the virtuous (similar arguments today can be heard from certain corners of the homophobic world), but up until Thrasymachus' radical re-analysis of what is natural, most philosophers held that what we would consider virtuous was, in fact, natural. One supposes that they were trying to rationally justify virtue without appealing to metaphysics. (Plato's great-uncle Critias explained the Greek pantheon of gods as an invention by wise men to keep the masses from breaking the laws necessary for social order, but I'll save a more indepth look into this interesting philosopher for another post.)
    (Interesting tidbit about Ayn Rand: she saw health warnings on cigarettes as a socialist conspiracy. Non-ironically, she was a regular smoker and died of lung cancer.)
    All of this is not to say that her ideas weren't influential (they were), or that they don't have some merit (they do), but I do want to stress that her ideas weren't original (though I'm definitely not accusing her of plagiarism), and, in my opinion, they're flawed because of assumptions she makes about human nature as well as failing to appreciate emergent behaviors. (Emergent behaviors are behaviors that exist in a collective that don't exist in any one individual. Emergent behaviors can be seen in the actions of bees, ants, and neural networks, as well as in humans.)
    Ironically, Ayn Rand's theories therefore remind me very much of Karl Marx's. In my opinion, he also made untenable assumptions about human nature, and he also failed to appreciate emergent behaviors. In both Rand and Marx's case, it's not hard to forgive them this oversight as the proper study of emergent behaviors is fairly new, in my opinion. However, one author I think had a much better grasp of human nature, despite preceding them both, is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In Notes From Underground, he makes the excellent observation that if some genius were to discover a set of scientific principles that would make each of us perfectly happy (an idea that was inspired by reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species), we would not follow these principles, because we cannot be truly happy following any rules. Although perhaps not rigorous from a logician's perspective, he effectively makes an argument reductio ad absurdum that no set of rules will ever make us happy, and that's true whether it's completely free-market capitalism, Marxism, or a semi-regulated semi-free-market capitalism with quasi-socialistic safety nets thrown in (or however you want to describe our current system). Of course, one could argue that neither Rand nor Marx were interested in happiness, but were pursuing other goals for us, such as freedom. Furthermore, Rand's disciples might argue that their Way is one of No Rules, just as many an atheist will argue that their Way is one of No Beliefs. (Not all atheists, mind you. I'm an atheist, and I'm perfectly comfortable talking about my beliefs, but I'll also save that for another post. Probably the same one where I discuss Critias.) As you can probably guess, I don't buy into the "No Rules" argument as the strongest will always make rules (refer back to Thrasymachus). It's up to us to help decide whether the strongest are the many or the few. I could go on, but for now I'll leave it be as this post already seems a tad bit too long.

Please comment if you stumble across this. This is my first posting, and I'm not sure if anyone will find it.