I agree with most of objectivism's underlying premises, although I disagree strongly with its recommended economic policies. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that this is the argument for capitalism that Ayn Rand put forth in her works:

1. Humans have complete free will; and this is self-evident to anyone who has free will, because by definition, free will includes awareness of free will.

2. True free will and determinism are incompatible.

3. Therefore, no form of determinism exists in the universe, or at least, humans are "exempt" from it. (by #1 and #2)

4. As a result of #1 and #3, a human is free to change his or her future in any direction, with enough effort.

5. Because of #4, humans should be held personally accountable for their actions and for their current state in life.

If 1 and 2 are held to be true, then it can be shown using the statements above that any person can choose to be hard-working, and that any hard-working person will always benefit from capitalism. Therefore, capitalism is an ideal.

I think that most of the logic involved is simple and true; however, I disagree with the end result because I believe that statements 1 and 2 are incompatible with each other.

#1 can very easily be shown true because if you are aware of your decision process, then you have a form of free will. However, the key fundamental of objectivism is that you can only have knowledge based on objective facts and reason; the only fact offered to you in the case of free will is that you are capable of making your own decisions based on your current state of mind and beliefs. You do not consciously control your state of mind at every second of your life; changing your state of mind deliberately requires your previous state of mind to allow you to make that decision in the first place. There very well may be a true free will possessed by humans, but since we can not directly observe every aspect of free will, we can not prove it factually, and thus objectivism does not (or at least should not) accept the existence of a complete free will based on personal experience. Even so, there is still a free will that can be objectively demonstrated - we just do not know for sure whether it is completely free will.

#2 is a simple statement of the philosophical idea of incompatibilism. This model holds that if a true free will exists, then an individual with free will can change the future, which renders determinism impossible. However, this logic is only solid if a true free will is assumed; but as noted earlier, I do not believe that there is any objective evidence for a complete free will, thus objectivism cannot justify it. The definition of free will as the ability to make decisions based on a given state of mind, which I believe objectivism can justify, is generally considered to be compatible with determinism.

In my opinion, this means that #1 and #2 are logically inconsistent. Therefore, humans cannot be held entirely accountable for all of their decisions - sometimes a bad situation is completely inevitable - and, as a result, pure capitalism is not an ideal based on this philosophy, regardless of whether it works well or not.