My problem with Ayn Rand is that she starts the description of her world view with agreeable statements like "A is A and therefore one can see truth (or draw objective conclusions) just by looking" (which disregards the problem of missing information). But then goes on to draw a moral from that idea which basically negates the whole point of objectivity by making the subject the center of the world. But that's not yet what makes her work propaganda.

What makes her work propaganda is that she, from there "induced" that, since there's only the individual that matters, it is only moral that one tries to maximize one's own happiness and that a fully capitalist society without any regulations whatsoever were we worship the then-to-be-godlike individual entrepreneur would be the only way to achieve said happiness. This also implies that while is is only moral to strive for one's own happiness, there is only a certain kind of individual who actually deserves it. The rest is there to worship or just be screwed over and over again, because there can be only a few winners.

So we've come a long way from making seemingly agreeable statements to justifying a system that dehumanizes most of its subjects (pun not intended) and makes them nothing more but a fleshy mass to the disposal of a select few winners. And that's just what propaganda does: drawing conclusions from a seemingly agreeable standpoint in a way that seems to be logical, but in its essence ignores the fuzziness and incompleteness of the world for the sake of some sense of purity. Don't be fooled by that. There's always complexity hiding somewhere. And while A might seem to be A, you just don't know, how large the hidden b is, yet.

In practice, I'd recommend to look for mental tools that help you analyze but always leave room to deal with the inconsistency of reality. Outside of formal science, consistency is a trap. Building a world view from a set of basic axioms works for mathematics, but not for the extremely complex network that is human relations. I had to learn that the hard way. I'd recommend thinking in networks, path dependencies, path probabilities and network centrality (power) instead. It leads you down a path that allows you to form a much clearer critique than you ever could by adopting Ayn Rand's way of thinking.

[1]: https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3

Regarding the economics: In the end someone is going to have to look after the kids. Looking at how much it costs to have kids, your argument makes no sense, too. If you just work and don't have children, you get paid the whole time and you also don't have to pay the enormous amount of money an extra human life costs.

So actually in the society you're proposing, having children would be even more of an economic drain than it is now, while parents would also miss out on the opportunity to form bonds with their child, therefore significantly worsening the child's life and maybe also even damage its psyche permanently ("my parents where never there for me" etc). Because not even remotely everyone can afford unpaid leave.

In the end, what you're arguing for is to worsen everyone's life just so you don't feel treated unfairly, even of you are not.

For the argument that the company has a problem by so called private choices: this is life. People get children. Self reproduction is basically the purpose of humanity. If your company (or to an extent your society) does not have the productivity to pay for their workers temporarily leaving, maybe it's just a shitty company. If your workers don't care for each other well being, maybe the company is just not a place worth of existence. Humans gotta look out for each other. That's basic human social behavior. That's what we're here for. As an employer of 10 people, I'm always happy to allow my workers taking off time for their children. Happens about once a year since I'm in the organization. Also we don't pay the full amount of the costs because it's subsidized by the state.

Children are awesome. Parents are awesome. And giving both the opportunity to form a bond, to not be stressed out and depressed, to make a basis for all the things they will become, all the things they will achieve in their later lifes, because they are healthy, loving, social humans – that's awesome.