Capitalism and Romance

Troy Camplin linked to a Cato piece that asked a strange question:

Was Ayn Rand right that romanticism is the proper literary reflection of capitalism?

It's a strange question, at least to me, because I don't recall her putting the issue that way. She did think something along those lines:

Romanticism is a product of the nineteenth century—a (largely subconscious) result of two great influences: Aristotelianism, which liberated man by validating the power of his mind—and capitalism, which gave man's mind the freedom to translate ideas into practice (the second of these influences was itself the result of the first),

William H. Patterson Jr., the author of the Cato piece, comes to his question from a different direction:

I like to work by referring questions to the nature of the genre.

He then shifts to discussing the romance, as a genre, describing it as story of "personal status lost and then restored". Which is all very well, but not what Rand had in mind exactly.

His piece is an interesting meditation on genre and narrative arc,
but he and Rand, terminologically, are ships that pass in the dark.