Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand--The Rabid Right's Latest Guru

A Love Affair Against the Common Good

By ggraves-fitzsimmons

April 11, 2011--This week’s Newsweek features a fascinating portrait of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan as an acolyte of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. Rand, of course, is perhaps the archetypical enemy of the common good.

Jonathan Chait writes:
The enduring heart of Rand’s totalistic philosophy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites.

One conservative making that point was Ryan. His citation of Rand was not casual. He’s a Rand nut. In the days before his star turn as America’s Accountant, Ryan once appeared at a gathering to honor her philosophy, where he announced, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”

WTF?

He continues to view Rand as a lodestar*, requiring his staffers to digest her creepy tracts.

While Rand criticized Marxism, she joined in Marx’s condemnation of religion. She called Christianity the “the best kindergarten of communism possible.”

An avid atheist, she saw religions’ support for the common good as antithetical to her individualistic philosophy.

*a star that leads or guides; especially the north star
  one that serves as an inspiration, model, or guide

As Paul Ryan leads the Republicans push towards immoral cuts to programs protecting families and the poor while giving tax breaks to millionaires, we must remember his proposal is rooted in Ayn Rand’s twisted view of individualism, not the commitment to the common good that runs through all religions.

Editor: Is America being washed of religion? All religion? Ayn Rand’s philosophy isn’t worthy of the ideals given to us by our forefathers. (Perhaps they need to be revisited.)

This country is built on solid and moral ideals. If we continue to follow Ayn Rand, we will further lose our way absent any religion, absent any compassion, absent any sympathy for the sick, the poor, the helpless.

Where are we being led? Is it really where we want to go?