There's an Ayn Rand revival in America these days. Sales of her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have skyrocketed in the past year, along with the number of Rand-themed articles in mainstream publications.

This is due to our government's "force the frugal to subsidise the prodigal" bailout schemes. When you face higher taxes and a larger national debt to bail out rich idiots who make more money in a day than you do all year, it's easy to think: "Know what I'd love to read right now? A thousand small-print pages ranting against looters."

And thus you add Atlas and Fountainhead to your personal library. (Rand's first novel, We The Living, gets far less attention. Were it as well-known as the other two, she wouldn't have quite the callous reputation she does now.)

Rand had a sharp eye for the evils of policies valuing the collective over individual rights. One of the best scenes in Atlas describes a factory that decides to operate on the communist principle "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". People are rewarded not for how well they work but how needy they claim to be, and the "abilities" and "needs" of any individual are determined by majority vote. Those deemed most able are forced to work the hardest, and you can't get anything as simple as new underwear without convincing the factory council that your old ones need to be replaced.

But for all Rand's genius at illustrating problems, her solutions, like her sex scenes, would be cataclysmic in real life. No mere human could meet the standards of a Randian hero. They're motivated purely by logic and cool reason, free of the petty emotions others strive to overcome. And they take "mind over matter" to impossible extremes. John Galt remains nonchalant even while being tortured, and when the torture machine breaks down he calmly tells its operators how to fix it. Randian heroes can will away the need for food and sleep, too.

Rand tried applying rational principles to things that aren't rational at all, including musical and artistic tastes. She deemed her own likes and dislikes for painters, composers and writers the only opinions a rational person could hold. In Fountainhead she spent many pages hammering home the point: "People who enjoy old-fashioned architectural flourishes, like Greek columns, are freedom-crushing haters of the human spirit." (Ironically, the functional modern architecture she espoused in their stead looks pretty much like the modernist style embraced by the Soviets.)

Rational Randian architecture is still better than rational Randian sex. The infamous "rape scenes" of her novels actually fall into the "rough but consensual" category, but Rand's heroines like it a lot rougher than most women do. No one scene is all too bad, but taken in their entirety you wonder why Rand felt a rational woman couldn't lay off the creepy vibe and try plain vanilla sex once in awhile.

A little spice is often nice, but there's nothing rational about drinking a whole Tabasco bottle. And the "woman subdued by strong man" meme Rand espoused in her books ran completely counter to her own life, where she alternated between terrorising her meek husband and the male acolytes she bedded.

Still, for all the darkly unreasonable expectations in Rand's novels, America's resurgence of interest in them might be our best chance yet to get off the dangerous anti-liberty track we're on now, and abandon the poisonous notion that the best way to resolve a financial crisis is to reward the people who caused it. Or maybe my cautious optimism is the most darkly unreasonable expectation of all.