The reason for Rand’s hostility to altruism is that it frequently militates against man’s survival, his pleasure, and his happiness. In Rand’s hedonistic philosophy it is rational and moral for us human beings to be concerned with our own interests, and we should be concerned with the welfare of others only to the degree that it gives us pleasure. Even love and friendship, Rand argues, are nothing more than “the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure” that we derive from other people. Consequently Rand finds herself positively enthusiastic about selfishness as the ground of human happiness. “The attack on selfishness,” Rand writes, “is an attack on man’s self-esteem.”

This is a weird and unpleasant doctrine, and indeed, Rand was a weird and unpleasant woman. Her intelligence, however, is not in doubt, and the failure of both Gilder’s and Rand’s attempts to vindicate capitalism morally show that the free-market system has a real problem in answering the charge of avarice.

I never thought I'd hear anyone called Rand a hedonist,  Hedonism is hardly an even remotely accurate description of the obsessive workaholic life Rand often portrays in her charachters, and that she did indeed live.  Clearly D'Souza lacks the conceptual distinction between hedonism (pleasure for it's own sake) and eudaimonism (total human well being which comes from a directed value based goal orientated life)