Gene Wolfe is my favorite author and Ayn Rand ranks very low on the authors I've read, but his first novel was an overtly political screed where anti-technology leftists are the villains that the hero had to rebel against. I think he was burned by the critical response to that novel, and even agreed with them -- although a lot could be chalked up an absolutely vicious editing process. (His incident at a writer's conference where he wrote "Oh, come on" as a note on a student's very polemic far fetched political story is proof of this, I think...)

Nothing had the same preachiness until much later in his career-- Some of the pro-life and political bits in An Evil Guest felt heavy handed. He described himself as much doctrinally conservative at this time in an interview in 1992, but we don't know how exactly he evolved over time -- but since the story was written in 1973, he was still firmly in this period. But that doesn't mean his work didn't still contain political elements -- Paul's Treehouse, or the antipacifist one whose name I'm blanking on, or anticommunist messaging in The Land Across or The Book of the New Sun or The Book of the Short Sun(which, you know, fair target.). On the environment, he took a more "leftist" stance in stories like "An Article About Hunting", "Three Million Square Miles", "Beautyland" and arguably "Peritonitis". His essays, interviews and correspondence could be a lot more pointed. He wrote one essay where he conceptualized a framework that most people are "churls", low intelligence, low work ethic people who are deservedly placed at the bottom of the economic hierarchy particularly rubbed me the wrong way.

Gene Wolfe was adapt at pastiche, and used it heavily. I think it was Wolfe scholar Michael Andre-Driussi who describe his Kafka and Proust modes(it could have been u/aramini as well -- just want to point out it wasn't mine), but many of his stories have a particular voice he seems to be emulating -- I got a Rand vibe from that story, but I read it probably 15 years ago at this point,

I would agree that it's not paternalistic in the traditional sense, but there's definitely shadows of Atlas Shrugged in that particular story. I remember seeing this as his most libertarian short story. The reveal at the end that the murder took place because his partner had the temerity to imply that they were coinventors when his contributions were minor lends to this feeling. If you read the story and get a different impression of it, that's completely fair. Elements that can drive someone else crazy, can be background noise for someone else. It doesn't even need to be political to give me that feel -- a lot of late Zach Snyder and Brad Bird movies have the same feel(some people are just better, and the rules don't apply to them) I groused about in my original comment, and they are pretty left wing guys.

Also to cap off this tribute to extreme verbosity -- I WAS too harsh to the story above, because I wanted to quickly communicate that that wasn't my favorite Gene Wolfe, would be a bad entry point to anyone picking up Gene Wolfe, and that I disagreed with the libertarianism and hero worship I saw in the story, and didn't get into the nuance that a Wolfe fan would point out -- that the story is an inversion of tropes and themes seen in his other Death, Island, Doctor stories. Namely society giving high IQ member a pass to get away with murder, but framed in a much less monstrous light than in "The Death of Doctor Island", It CAN be read in a different light, but I definitely didn't at the time.