I'll go further than the parent commenter and say that I think Randian ideals are absurd and anyone who sincerely supports or buys into them is deranged. But I

I'll go further than the parent commenter and say that I think Randian ideals are absurd and anyone who sincerely supports or buys into them is deranged. But I think the quote is interesting in this context because it's so obvious and so relevant that capitalism is resulting in the same dehumanization that Rand ascribes to socialism. To put it another way, it would be easy to imagine this variant of the quote being real (to be completely clear, it isn't): >> Capitalism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to the capitalists, that the only justification of his existence is his service to the capitalists, and that the capitalists may dispose of him in any way they please for the sake of their own profit. > -Karl Marx ...and that claim, unlike Rand's, would have been both accurate and relevant.