If that's all you took from her philosophy - being an individual is good, working hard is good, etc. - then you missed a lot of the detail.
To Rand, the ultimate measure of one's self worth is how much money you are making vs. how much you could be making. Building a company up, then offshoring all of your labor to China is more moral than keeping your operations local, because it will lower your costs, and therefore increase profits. And profits, to Rand, is the only thing that matters, as long as you aren't stealing from somebody else.
Similarly, in Rand's book it would be moral for, say, hedge fund managers to make risky bets on bad mortgage-backed securities, even if such a house of cards would eventually cause huge harm to the world economy, as long as the hedge fund managers make money doing so.
In Rand's world, there are no such things as externalities. There is only black and white, good and evil. It is a fairy tale land where everybody is always capable of making rational decisions with perfect information. Markets are always perfectly efficient.
Within the context of her writings, her philosophy works because she gets to define the axioms. But it all falls apart when one realizes that the world is far more complex than she imagines it to be.
It never ceases to amaze me the certitude with which people demonstrate their ignorance of Rand. This is complete nonsense. Rand never said making money is the highest value nor that it should be the sole standard of any value, dropping all other context.
A moments thought, if you know anything of Rands works, would demonstrate this to you. If you read The Foundtainhead, then you know that Roark gave up work for years because he had higher values in life than simply to maximize his income. And Atlas Shrugged was about a man who did the same, and took a bunch of others with him -- not because they thought this was the best way to optimize their long-term money making potential, but because the rest of the world had come to regard them, being creative and productive individuals, as chattel. (You might also recall that while there were a number of titans of industry, one was a composer, another was a professor, another an train engineer, etc.)
I don't know what it is about Rand that makes people think they're entitled to sling nonsense about her views around without the slightest effort at substantiation. You say Rand's is a "fairy tale land where everybody is always capable of making rational decisions with perfect information" and "Markets are always perfectly efficient". This is your fairy tale about Rand's views. I studied all of Rand's works quite extensively from about the age of 17 to 27, and I'm confident you cannot demonstrate that Rand held such views.
Enough of the quote to get the actual point across: "Money is the barometer of society's virtue[...]when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work[...]your society is doomed."
The point was, in the ideal society, money is the barometer of society's virtue. Presuming that all money is _earned_, more of it is an indication of the society's success. So, the motive is indeed to maximize profit, earned profit.
> It is a fairy tale land where everybody is always capable of making rational decisions with perfect information. Markets are always perfectly efficient.
Well, just as the Marx fairy tail is studied, I think the Rand fairy tail (and it is) is good for thought too.
To Rand, the ultimate measure of one's self worth is how much money you are making vs. how much you could be making. Building a company up, then offshoring all of your labor to China is more moral than keeping your operations local, because it will lower your costs, and therefore increase profits. And profits, to Rand, is the only thing that matters, as long as you aren't stealing from somebody else.
Similarly, in Rand's book it would be moral for, say, hedge fund managers to make risky bets on bad mortgage-backed securities, even if such a house of cards would eventually cause huge harm to the world economy, as long as the hedge fund managers make money doing so.
In Rand's world, there are no such things as externalities. There is only black and white, good and evil. It is a fairy tale land where everybody is always capable of making rational decisions with perfect information. Markets are always perfectly efficient.
Within the context of her writings, her philosophy works because she gets to define the axioms. But it all falls apart when one realizes that the world is far more complex than she imagines it to be.