Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed or Wishing won't make it so. You can't eat your cake and have it, too. Man is an end in himself. Give me liberty or give me death. I agree with this.
Facts are facts.
Truth is truth, something external to us that is discovered, not the product of our own wills. I'm glad you embrace this idea rather than the silly postmodernist notion that truth is the product of will. Rand identifies reason as the faculty that identifies and integrates sense experience. If you insist that the inference is made by a chain of reasoning, I desire you to produce that reasoning. Hume succinctly shows the breakdown of Rand's epistemology here.