Jonathan Chait has a review of a couple of new biographies of Ayn Rand (h/t Sullivan).  This passage struck me:

But this was false. Rand spent her first
months in this country subsisting on loans from relatives in Chicago,
which she promised to repay lavishly when she struck it rich. (She
reneged, never speaking to her Chicago family again.) She also enjoyed
the great fortune of breaking into Hollywood at the moment it was
exploding in size, and of bumping into DeMille. Many writers equal to
her in their talents never got the chance to develop their abilities.
That was not because they were bad or delinquent people. They were
merely the victims of the commonplace phenomenon that Bernard Williams
described as "moral luck."

The denial of familial help and social support is most striking, especially from an ancient Chinese philosophical perspective.  It is, simply, a pure yet deluded selfishness that ignores the most fundamental features of human life.  For a Taoist those features are an inescapable embeddedness in a vast and uncontrollable Way, and a profound limitation of human knowledge and action.  For a Confucian those features are an axiomatic sociality of humanity and a clear impossibility of morality in isolation. 

The contradiction may be greatest with Confucianism, since Rand seems to believe that she is developing a moral theory.  She wants to contend that morality is best achieved through the cultivation and empowerment of the individual without reference to social context.  This is an absurdity to a Confucian.  Morality can only be defined in social terms; we find our moral selves precisely in our relations to others.  Our individuality is determined by our familial and social roles and duties.  Indeed, that was the reality of Rand's life: she did, despite her protestations to the contrary, receive help from her family.  And she chose to simply ignored her obligations to reciprocate that care.  In that, and in other aspects of her life, she was deeply immoral.