Except that it is precisely the opposite in certain important details. John Galt did not want a functioning society funded by money tax^H^H^H stolen from him. He did not want the society to offer medical care or education to "engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home" He went to strike and pushed for existing society's destruction precisely because he did not want those.
(On the grandparent, I have to agree that occasionally I feel like the development of society at large is kept hostage by morons. Not only politics, but practically everything seems to be built for the lowest common denominator. It may really be that one day in the future some kind of Galt's Gulch is needed. Only Rand is going to be turning in her grave. If not for any other reason, then because in this gulch the members are pissing on her grave.)
(I don't want to get into a pedantic fight over Any Rand / objectivism / Atlas Shrugged, I simply want to share an alternative viewpoint)
It seems to me that Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged get used to justify a lot of brutalist ideas, even among her direct inheritors. Having watched some of her interviews and read several of her books, I'm not convinced that the elimination of government was her intent. Further, while she tried to paint a realistic picture, ultimately Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction that falls apart when placed within real-world constructs, especially 50+ years on after its publication.
At the heart of it, what Rand appeared to most argue in Atlas Shrugged was against regulation and governance that superseded the inalienable rights of citizens plus centralized power in an authoritarian state and took away the economic agency of the individual. That doesn't preclude a functioning republic where people can own businesses, own the rights to their creations, and still pay taxes for the benefits of services best provided by government.
Now here's the irony: Rather than coming for our system via communism, which was Rand's concern, instead it was nominal capitalists who came to destroy the system via regulatory capture. I don't see what the right-wing, nominal capitalists in the US have done to be any different than the moochers in Rand's book.
To me both communism and right-wing (brutalist aynrandian) capitalism are the same in some sense. Both are somewhat nice ideologues in naive theory. But if you bring them to real world, communism brings you Soviet Union and right-wing capitalism brings you regulatory capture moochers or warlords, depending a bit on your flavor of capitalism.
The major difference is that only some insignificant weirdos in the fringes have not agreed that communism is stupid in practice. Brutalist aynrandian ideology is much more prevalent problem and needs to be somehow gotten into same ridiculed state as communism as an actual feasible ideology.
Hopefully not getting too lost in the pedantry, and I'm absolutely not a Rand supporter (though I had my 16-year old Atlas Shrugged phase where I actually read the whole damn book).
a) You're spot on she didn't want to destroy the govt. She was explicitly a minarchist, and she swapped major arugments and ridicule with the Ancaps of the time (like Murray Rothbard)
b) The communism hate gets floated most, but my read of Atlas Shrugged was that she placed the collectivists at the same evil level as the church, crony capitalists, and postmodernists, to the point of having characters who 1-dimensionally represented each of them (she's literally got a lobbyist character called "Wesley Mouch").
That's why it's always hilarious to me when I see neocon congressfolk saying that Atlas Shrugged is their favorite book: she hated the church as much as the government (and would've likely hated those politicians as well).
