Who says I'm finished with Rand? I have a second lengthy article on Objectivism coming out soon.

I agree that there's such a thing as heroic effort, and we do indeed laud heroic success stories, including the billionaires and the CEOs. So there's a Nietzschean story to tell about how slave moralists denigrate that heroism, out of resentment or supernatural diversions. I'm sympathetic to that basic secular side of Rand's worldview.

But like Nietzsche and other conservatives, she does divide the world into winners and losers. She calls the losers "altruists," and they include theists and socialists. I reject theism, but socialism (as opposed to communism) isn't nearly as irrational. In my view, and as I've argued elsewhere, the celebration of dominance hierarchies is animalistic and it thus runs counter to secular humanism. I prefer a more existential reading of secular modernity. The libertarianis too naïve in her view of history, psychology, and economics.