You obviously got a much different message out of her writings than I did.
I did. And I would neither call myself malevolent nor an imbecile. I won't return the favor of suggesting you are one of those, but I do think you gave her a superficial read, or were misled by wrongful summaries of what she said in other works, and that your conclusions about the philosophy are wrong. I read all of her non-fiction (Philosophy: Who Needs It, Virtue of Selfishness, etc.) as well as scholarly work building on Rand including Tara Smith's Viable Values, Ronald Merrill's The Ideas of Ayn Rand, and Doug Uyl's Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand as well as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Alasdair Macintyre's Short History of Ethics and After Virtue to get a better understanding of classical virtue ethics in general.
In fact, Ayn Rand's ethics are extremely similar to Aristotle's. Her meta-ethical derivation of them is slightly different (she disregards the teleological metaphyiscs of Aristotle in favor of a functional analysis of why we have or need ethics in the first place), but the end result is the same: Classical, virtue-centered ethics focused on living a good life in accordance with reason.
Classical ethics and modern ethics are really two entirely different things. Classical ethics answers the question "How best can I live a flourishing life?" Modern ethichs answers the question "What duties do I owe to other people?" Modern ethics presumes there is no answer to how to live your life, and says do what you want as long as you uphold all your duties to others. It is inherently other-regarding. Classical ethics answers how to live a flourishing life by explaining why you have duties to yourself and is inherently self-regarding. Duties to others are secondary to classical ethics, so often a modern ethicist who looks at classical ethics sees it as saying "you owe no duties to other people" and concludes that is at best amoral and at worst vicious and evil ethics. But modern ethics is simply unequipped to see or deal with self-regarding ethics. A classical ethical code is *more demanding* than a modern ethical code and in fact leads to far more ethically proscribed behavior towards others.
Whenever I see someone reject or misunderstand classical ethics (Rand's, Aristotle's, or otherwise) I always recommend they read Alisdair Macintyre thoroughly, as he demolishes all competing ethical theories and shows why utilitarianism, intuitionism, and so on cannot stand up to the nihilistic destruction of Nietzsche. Virtue ethics, because it is rooted in function (helping a person live a good life) is the only one that can. Macintyre does a much better job than Rand in explaining why virtue ethics are worthwhile.
As for W. Chambers and his nonesense review, living one's life in accordance with principles of individualism, rationality, integrity, magnanimity, and self-reliance are not the cornerstones of genocide. History has already demonstrated which moral systems have led to the most genocidal regimes, and they are all collectivist: Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, Racism, Tribalism. Classical ethics can produce an Alexander, but it could never produce a Hitler.
