Can we lay off on the obnoxious Rand criticism? She's like anybody: Half her ideas are really good and worth discussing, half of them are crap. Rand was a lot more obnoxious than a lot of philosophers, but that doesn't immediately invalidate her ideas, and the fact remains that shrill as her voice may sound in the philosophical world, she made her ideas easier to understand than most philosophers do.

Look at Nietzsche. Absolutely pretentious, wrote his philosophy in semifictional narratives, made up ridiculous fantasies like eternal recurrence. But people don't dis Nietzsche like they do Rand, not even when his readers are more obnoxious and pretentious than even the most obnoxious of Objectivists, because Nietzsche at least hit the vein of being difficult and therefore respectable.

Give Rand credit for at least one thing: Her ideas are given to you so simplistically that it's very easy to build a counterargument against them. Would that most philosophers would do the same favor.

That said, this article shouldn't be here, and Objectivism debates are old and tired.

tl;dr Blasting Rand without balance is just as bad as worshipping her without balance, so if you're going to disagree with her be less of a jerk about it.