Hayek was a very good economist who made the mistake of contradictorily mixing, in his philosophical theory, Hume’s skepticism with Kant’s positivist criticism and religiosity. Ayn Rand was a good novelist who made the mistake of paradoxically mixing the common-sense with “reality”.
In her theory, Ayn Rand started from the “three axioms” ― existence, identity and consciousness. As we all know, as “principle” the axiom does not depend on anything else to exist as such. On the other hand, Ayn Rand refuses any transcendental spiritual dimension; and that is her main contradiction because in a exclusively classical material world, everything should be determined by causality laws and every effect would have a cause.
By definition, a “principle” as for example “the sum of the internal angles of any triangle is 180 degrees”, or that “no fact can be true or real, or no judgment can be correct without a sufficient reason”, both axioms do not depend on anything else to exist as they are― they simply always existed since the Big Bang occurred 120 billion of light-years ago. The truth about those axioms are atemporal, they exist in a atemporal spiritual dimension in which the human reason has its share and takes part of.
Ayn Rand’s biggest mistake was not to clearly distinguish between human reason which was created by evolution and its capacity of participating in the atemporal dimension of truths. There is nothing at all that could be deducted from experience (empiricism) and remain valid eternally, as the atemporal truths do.
