Ayn Rand's demise started when she was unable to uphold her own philosophy, collapsing in front of her lover Nathaniel Branden and accusing him of immorality for leaving her for a younger woman. Wasn't he acting out of "rational" self-interest?

But (what I perceive to be) Ayn Rand's core argument is also flawed IMO. Is altruism directly opposed to rational self-interest, as she claims? To me, obviously not: for example, parents make constant sacrifices to raise their children, with various degrees of success and various degrees of awareness about how much of that sacrifice is for their own self-interest. In each of us parents lives that stereotypical labourer who raises his children in order to use them on his field. But we do invest ourselves emotionally, practically, financially, into the upbringing of our kids. This is altruism in a completely rational context.

Alan Greenspan was a protégé of Ayn Rand. Holy moly! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan#Objectivism

informatic glossary to biopsychology

life = problem of (biological?) sustainability
human = biological problem solver
mind = problem-solving software
senses = input devices - device drivers
mental model = dynamic data model (graph) relative to a given context
attention = CPU priority - active memory
focus = selecting attention target
awareness/consciousness/perception = sensing - feature recognition - modelling - simulation - query
behaviour = input->output feedback consisting of awareness, problem selection, goal selection, problem solving, planning, execution
sensation = storage of sense data in the body and the brain
emotion = storage of awareness in the body and the brain
intelligence = ability to behave relatively to a given context
memory = physical support for dynamic data model in the body and the brain
sleep = partial shutdown of input senses - redirection of CPU to internal tasks: dreaming and body reconstruction
dream = optimization of dynamic data model in memory - classification - cross-referencing
thought = a traversal of the dynamic data model
idea = awareness of a thought