Everyone goes through an Ayn Rand phase. It's part of growing up. It happens about age 18 when people plough through the turgid, stultifyingly boring epistles of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and decide there is a conspiracy in every community aimed at despoiling the purity of the unencumbered individual.
By the time they turn 21 most people have realized this is nonsense, a recipe for social chaos. However, some idiots, like Ronald Reagan, and, Allan Greenspan, never achieve that level of enlightenment (along with some closer to home), and that's left us with the mess the world economy has become, run by hypocritical oligarchs, who prey on superficial concepts of 'free' markets, to loot and impoverish the world.