BY THE WAY: The below inspires me to seek out the secret Rand-Nietzsche connection; I enjoy this old Lingua Franca piece. I am moved to blog the final lines of said piece:

Was Ayn Rand just a writer of pulp-fiction sensibilities with a knack for euphemizing greed in a spirit of self-help profundity? Or was she the last of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals--a novelist-sage who was able to address the problems of freedom and domination in terms that readers are likely to appreciate well into the next millennium (whether their teachers want them to or not)?

If value and judgment are grounded in objectivity, it should be possible to reach some definitive conclusion. But at the risk of metaphysical evasion, the answer may be: both.

The article describes Objectivism in quasi-religious terms. Here's the part where I talk out of my ass: Ayn Rand is the A.E. van Vogt of philosophy. There you go.