I was a fanatical Randroid myself in my younger years, and while she may not have gone as far as "never accept handouts", she did go as far as "never expect handouts", and in Rand's system there is explicitly no right or expectation to anything unearned.

Rand's opposition to "libertarians" was purely a personal dislike of the people in Rand's time who called themselves libertarians. Most sensible definitions of the word "libertarian", ranging anywhere from "an advocate for limited government" to "an advocate of the non-aggression principle" easily entail Rand's philosophy.

Finally, while I think Ayn Rand was irrational or just plain wrong in many aspects of her philosophy and in her personal and political dealings, and while I think her philosophy has frankly horrific consequences, I don't hate the woman. I actually have a degree of fondness for her, and her role in my intellectual development.

I'm in the same boat. I used to think that Rand had legitimate points and that hey, a society like that could work.

Of course, I was fifteen at the time. Finding the intellectual discipline necessary to realize that Rand's philosophy was predicated on nonsense and that I had been wrong was important to my intellectual development.

I was a "communist" when I was 15. Visiting the Soviet Union taught me just how wrong I was.

I'm gently worried that young people aren't allowed to make similar mistakes - reading the wrong websites or sending the wrong tweets can be really harmful to some people's lives.

I am a fanatical libertarian and Rand is not a major figure in most modern circles.

Austrian writers are the go to role models for most libertarians, Hayek, Mises, my favorite is Rothbard.

Are you aware the Rothbard thinks of children as property, and is anti-semitic, among other disgusting positions?

And that Hayek sympathizes, morally, with socialism?

Mises is wonderful but these other people you list with him are really quite different than him.

Rothbard:

"The parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die."

See http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/fourteen.asp

Yeah, pretty disgusting.

I think what Rothbard and Rand both illustrate is the flaw of letting logical consistency override every other consideration, including basic human decency and moral intuition, when developing one's moral sense.

There is a pretty clear logical flaw here. Nothing is produced in a vacuum. Your ability to create, to generate wealth, is heavily reliant on the infrastructure and services provided by your society (electricity, defense, roads, education, etc).

In other words, if Bill Gates had been born in Somalia, chances are he wouldn't be nearly as successful.

Taxation is how you repay your debt to the society that enabled your success.

Actually, Rand's view was that government wouldn't provide electricity, roads and education. These goods and services would be private and paid for by the people who wanted to use them.

Defense was a different matter, in that in her view, that was one of the legitimate functions of government -- protecting the individual rights of the citizens.

Rand acknowledged that every generation stands on the shoulders of the productive people who came before them.

Yes, if Bill Gates was born in Somalia he probably wouldn't have followed the path he did. If Somalia was a nation where individual rights were respected, as Rand advocated, everyone in Somalia would be much better off.