McSweeney’s has a nice parody of Atlas Shrugs for modern times which does a good job of pointing out how silly Ayn Rand seems these days when the financial masters of the universe don’t seem quite so masterful and the idea of government regulation doesn’t seem quite so pernicious compared to the alternative. Also, Rand’s ideas were always tarnished as being part of the age old quest to turn selfishness and greed into virtues. I don’t suppose writers and other thinkers ever went broke telling rich people that their money was a sign of righteousness and that God loved them; all that camel passing through the eye of a needle business notwithstanding.
The rand-bots that I know have long spun signs of our faltering economy as symptomatic of, get this, too much governmental intervention.
See, Objectivism, Libertarianism (distinct, I’d argue), and Conservatism don’t fail… people fail the ideologies.
Or something.