I actually understand both points of view. Ayn Rand disliked Libertrians because her vision of mankind was that people should be free, but to be free they needed to cultivate certain values and habits. In short, freedom can’t work without virtuous people. Or at least, in return for freedom people have a responsibility to behave properly.
I would argue that if freedom requires everyone to be an ubermensch, we, might as well just give up. And it doesn’t. Evolution and emergence creates the incentives that keep people doing things that benefit society.
Libertrians would simply say, “freedom means you don’t get to tell me how I should behave.” In the context of the time she was writing that, there were a lot of libertarians in the ‘counterculture’, and the accusation against them was that they were just conservatives who wanted to do drugs and have a lot of sex. That repulsed Rand. There was also some truth to it.
In the same way, Rand thought “National Review” was the most dangerous magazine in America, because the magazine attempted to tie the right to religion, and Rand was a militant atheist, She was also an intolerant, nasty woman who used her philosophy to bizarrely justify her own obnoxious behaviour. She didn’t get along with anyone, and reserved most of her hatred for the people on her side of the ideological divide who still would not accept Objectivism.
My own view is more informed by information theory and complexity theory. Hayek would be closest to a major influence. And he was no Libertarian, and he was not a conservative. He believed in a social safety net, as do I. But he understood the folly of central planning and industrial policy, and understood that complex systems need to be made up of free agents operating in a rules based system. Such systems cannot be predicted, planned, or controlled. Trying to do it results in unintended consequences and often the opposite of what you wanted.
I would argue that constitutions set the basic rules, and within that set of rules people should be left to their own choices, allowed to keep their own property subject to taxation required to keep the government operating, etc.
This is also why free speech must be absolute. You can’t have truly independent actors if central authorities are modifying or limiting the information they are allowed to see. And I would never trust those authorities to not tip the playing field in their preferred direction, which adds a giant common mode failure mode to otherwise antifragile systems.
In my world, if you want progress you have to convince the people to do it voluntarily. Forcing major change in an evolved complex system is always a bad idea. It has to happen organically, at its own rate. Forcing change or forcing the rate to increase is a shock to the system, and that’s bad. That’s when you get unintended consequences.