Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin claims he has a “knack for numbers.” Not long ago, he unveiled his GOP budget proposal titled “Path to Prosperity.” Rachel Maddow criticized members of the media for their fawning coverage of Ryan and his
financial “magnum opus.” Said Maddow: “If the Beltway media could stop making out with Paul Ryan for long enough to look at what’s actually in his budget proposal, they might notice that some of the important numbers in it appear to be made up.” She added: “I doubt that actual numerically based fact based information will penetrate the smoochy smoochy love bubble surrounding Paul Ryan right now…there’s this cult of him being brave and bold and doing this difficult workout every morning. What he’s just introduced is not a feature on grit versus glamour in today’s GOP. It is not a pinup. It is not the brave story of a strong boy in a tough environment. It’s the official Republican Party budget for 2012, and the numbers in it are so wrong they are occasionally funny.”
Anne Lowrey summarizes Ryan’s proposal in an article in Slate titled Model Misbehavior: Why Paul Ryan’s budget numbers don’t add up: “Tax cuts to wealthy Americans foster prosperity that moves millions of (less wealthy) Americans back to work, with increasing wages. High earnings and employment bolster tax revenue. When combined with huge cuts in domestic spending and radical changes to Medicaid and Medicare, the budget balances out in about 20 years.” Lowrey goes on to explain, however, that Ryan’s plan relied on numbers provided by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis—which have been exposed “as a bit fantastical.”
Harold Meyerson wrote the following about Ryan’s budget proposal: “The cover under which Ryan and other Republicans operate is their concern for the deficit and national debt. But Ryan blows that cover by proposing to reduce the top income tax rate to just 25 percent. He imposes the burden for reducing our debt not on the bankers who forced our government to spend trillions averting a collapse but on seniors and the poor. The reductions in aid to the poor, says the budget blueprint that Ryan released, will be made ‘to ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.’ That’s a pretty good description of America’s top bankers, but Ryan’s budget showers them with tax cuts.”
Ryan claims his budget proposal is a “compassionate” one—but Pat Garofalo begs to differ. Garofalo says that the “Path to Prosperity” would “double health care costs for seniors, endanger vital Medicaid services, and likely increase taxes on the middle-class to finance tax cuts for the rich.”
E. D. Kain thinks that Ryan’s budget is not serious one. He says that it’s ideological—and suspects “that its intention is to shift the debate and make the Ryan budget the leaping off point for further budgets.”
There are many who would agree that Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” is indeed based on ideology. One might ask what the ideological foundation of his thinking was when he prepared the 2012 GOP budget.
Jonathan Chait provides us with an explanation of why Ryan’s budget helps those at the very top while hurting the middle class and the less fortunate in his Newsweek article titled War on the Weak: How the GOP came to view the poor as parasites—and the rich as our rightful rulers. In the article, Chait wrote about what has motivated both Paul Ryan and the Tea Party:
“In fact, the two streams—the furious Tea Party rebels and Ryan the earnest budget geek—both spring from the same source. And it is to that source that you must look if you want to understand what Ryan is really after, and what makes these activists so angry.
“The Tea Party began early in 2009 after an improvised rant by Rick Santelli, a CNBC commentator who called for an uprising to protest the Obama administration’s subsidizing the “losers’ mortgages.” Video of his diatribe rocketed around the country, and protesters quickly adopted both his call for a tea party and his general abhorrence of government that took from the virtuous and the successful and gave to the poor, the uninsured, the bankrupt—in short, the losers. It sounded harsh, Santelli quickly conceded, but “at the end of the day I’m an Ayn Rander.”
“Ayn Rand, of course, was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard—a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived. 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.”
A couple of weeks ago, Tom Ashbrook moderated a discusson about Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan on his radio program On Point with Jonathan Chait, senior editor at The New Republic, Anne C. Heller, journalist and author of “Ayn Rand and the World She Made,” and Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks. The program was titled Ayn Rand’s Resurgence. In his summary of the program, Ashbrook wrote: “The American budget battle so far is really a battle of ideals. And at the back of a vocal chorus on the Republican/Tea Party right sits the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand.” Ashbrook and his guests talked about “what it means to have “Atlas Shrugged” in the middle of the budget debate.”
Click here to listen to the program.
In an article for The New Republic, Jonathan Chait wrote more about Ryan, his budget, and Ayn Rand:
Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan’s moral philosophy:
“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,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” …
At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand’s writings when he told his audience that, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill … is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict–individualism versus collectivism.”
The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.
There is no doubt that Ryan has been impressed by the words and works of novelist/philosopher Rand. He declared his admiration for her in Facebook videos that he posted in 2009.
Facebook Videos Posted by Paul Ryan
Ayn Rand’s Relevance in 2009
Ayn Rand & 2009 America, Part 2
The Truth about GOP Hero Ayn Rand (Think Progress)
So there you have it—a GOP budget proposal for 2012 brought to you by Rep. Paul Ryan, acolyte and admirer of Ayn Rand. It’s a “path to prosperity” for those who are already prosperous.
SOURCES
War on the Weak: How the GOP came to view the poor as parasites—and the rich as our rightful rulers. (Newsweek)
Paul Ryan And Ayn Rand (The New Republic)
Rachel Maddow Tears Into Beltway Media For Paul Ryan Budget Coverage (Huffington Post)
Who’s hurt by Paul Ryan’s budget proposal (Washington Post)
Model Misbehavior: Why Paul Ryan’s budget numbers don’t add up (Slate)
Paul Ryan’s ‘Compassionate’ Budget Would Gut The Food Safety Net (Think Progress)
Paul Ryan And The Republican Vision (The New Republic)
The Man Behind Paul Ryan’s Budget Plan Got the Tax Cuts Wrong, Too (The Atlantic)
Paul Ryan’s Budget Proposal Would Increase Public Debt Relative To Extending Current Law (Think Progress)
Paul Ryan’s Multiple Unicorns (New York Times)
What’s wrong with Paul Ryan’s budget? (Washington Examiner)
Tea Party Embraces Ayn Rand (Frum Forum)
fuguewriter,
“I did. Though the onus is on those who claim it *is* valid to address the fatal flaws thus exposed. Do you really believe that anyone’s whole lives can be reduced to or judged by a few pages from our barely-out-of-teen years journals – which are inaccurately excerpted, anyway.”
Just because you claim you proved something doesn’t make it so. I don’t count your words as proof. If Rand’s journals were inaccurately excerpted, provide us with more excerpts from her journals on the subject of Hickman to prove that she thought he was a monster and not a superman.
I believe Rand was in her twenties when she wrote about Hickman in her journals. Rand is held up as an icon and a great philosopher by her acolytes and admirers. They quote her “words of wisdom” and her “great ideas.” Shouldn’t all of her words and writings be examined?
**********
I understand that there were bubbles in the 1990s–including the “.com” bubble.
Did I say that greed magically appeared? Don’t put words in my mouth. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act via the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act–aka the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999–led to a number of financial abuses. Another thing: The ratings agencies rated certain securities as AAA–even though they weren’t AAA.
Elaine M. –
>> “The Hickman claim is yet another piece of Internet disinformation.”
> Prove it.
I did. Though the onus is on those who claim it *is* valid to address the fatal flaws thus exposed. Do you really believe that anyone’s whole lives can be reduced to or judged by a few pages from our barely-out-of-teen years journals – which are inaccurately excerpted, anyway.
I’m quite familiar with economic history, and was in the mortgage industry for 10 years until 2001, thanks. The industry was emphatically not deregulated – it was choked with regulation. “Deregulation” is the usual excuse for government error. All the bad effects of the phenomena you talk about were made possible only by paper money, not real money. Can’t run a debt bubble ona gold standard. The cause of the bubbling began long ago, in the early 1990s at earliest, with the world savings glut post-Cold War, which dropped interest rates too low. Wall Street, sorry to say, didn’t control the whole world. Observe that the bubbling happened all over – Europe too. Ayn Bus Greenspan had total control over there?
As for “greed” – same situation. Why did greed magically appear just then and at no other time? And it got worse with Dems in Congress? Hmm. No. The crash wasn’t due to magically-appearing “greed.” It was the culmination of decades of government intervention.
The government makes “greed” of the kind we saw *possible* by issuing fiat currency.
Fugue State,
“1. Social Security, according to the government, is a lock-box trust fund of one’s own money. So it’s not government ‘aid’.”
No. It’s not. Social security is an insurance program funded through payroll tax deductions that encompasses several social welfare and social insurance programs including the OASDI program (Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance – what most people think of as social security), SSI (Supplemental Security Income – provides stipends to low-income people who are either aged (65 or older), blind, or disabled and although administered by the SSA, it is paid for out of the general treasury), TAFN (Temporary Aid for Families in Need), unemployment benefits, Medicare (again, insurance not a trust fund), Medicaid (grants to states to pay for health care), and SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program).
So it is government aid in the form of insurance provided at cost and on a not-for-profit basis combined with grants.
“2. Rand never said everyone should surrender monies taken by the government to the government. Ever. On the contrary, she said publicly that everyone should take back what has been taken and fight for the end of those programs. She makes one of her characters in “Atlas Shrugged” – Ragnar – do just that.”
Petitio principii – begging the question that taxation is a form of theft when it is not only legal but it is not theft. It is the essential funding mechanism of government since the invention of government. Some of the earliest known writings of any sort are a cuneiform tax records on clay shards from Sumer. You can’t have government without taxation. End of story. Saying taxation is theft is not only an opinion, not a fact, it’s a stupid opinion unless you just like anarchy.
“There can be no compromise on basic principles . . . ” – Ayn Rand
“’no valid caveats to deviate from said basic principles’
And none of you have shown that she did.”
“If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.” – Ayn Rand
“‘Do as I say’
The onus is on you to prove that she said it. She didn’t. She publicly said *the opposite*, so at worst she was inconsistent. (And she was not, in this.)”
“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” – Ayn Rand
Since social programs are by their very nature social altruism designed to eliminate suffering, ease poverty and ensure a baseline level of health in the citizenry and since Rand considered altruism a “true evil”, then she is indeed compromising her basic principles by taking Social Security in any form. So yeah, we have shown that she did. If you want to live in denial of that fact, well, you should be used to living in denial already as an objectivist. The faulty premise here is that altruism is evil rather than a survival trait.
“‘Taxation is not theft’
In other words, you impatiently brush across what she actually thought. You have jumped from unproved hypocrisy to ‘Nyah nyah she was wrong.'”
No. I’ve jumped from an established fact of law found int our Constitution and a necessity of the operation of any form of governance as evidenced by the entirety of recorded human history and landed with both my feet squarely on your patron saint’s head. Lawful taxation is in fact the very first power of Congress listed.
U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Section 8 – Powers of Congress
“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;”
So it’s not a case of “nyah, nyah, she was wrong”, it’s a case of “here’s the proof she was talking out of her ass in the form of both history and law that contradict her”. Wishful thinking does not make the assertion that taxes are theft so. It makes it wishful thinking.
“‘promoting the general welfare of society’
‘of society’ is not in the Constitution, bub.”
Really? Then who exactly are the Founders talking about promoting the general welfare of then? Martians? Only objectivists? Perhaps only guys named “Bruce”?
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Got that, sunshine? Establishing the laws that govern the society of the United States of America.
“And the general welfare spoken of was not a collectivist, rights-violating thing.”
How wrong you are. Both Madison and Jefferson were influenced by utilitarianism found in the writings of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. They also both considered “general welfare” as a term interchangeable with “common good” as have the courts and legal scholars since then. Utilitarianism defines the the general welfare as “the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number of individuals”. Since all groups are by definition collectives (involving all members of a group as distinct from its individuals) and government is a group action it is inherently a form of collective action; to whit, a collective action of entering into a social compact where some trade offs are made (such as taxation and being subject to common criminal and civil laws) by the individuals to protect the whole (including individuals) from violence and other kinds of wrongs such as theft and torts. A social compact is formed by the nature of your familial relationship’s citizenship and in our country, the social compact remains voluntary – i.e. you are free to renounce your citizenship at any time and leave in contrast to places like North Korea where your only option is defection and/or political asylum if you want to leave. These restrictions on the individual are the tradeoff for having a stable governed society instead of anarchy.
“The ultimate general welfare is a free society in which individual rights are respected. That’s a basic principle.”
No. That’s not a basic principle. That’s a half truth. The ultimate general welfare is a free society in which individual rights are respected as much as possible while doing what is necessary to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility (stability and peace), provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare (the common good), and secure the blessings of liberty to the extent possible while pursuing the aforementioned legitimate goals of government. Your rights end where the rights of others begin. Your pursuit of happiness is constrained by law if it materially interferes with the pursuit of happiness of others. That is the price of the social compact.
“‘ass back to Russia or to some third country’
Thank you for revealing your hate so clearly.”
Hating the selfish, the venal and the generally sociopathic is no vice. They are predators within our self-predatory species. A valid goal of the social compact being protection of ourselves from ourselves mandates that those who would harm society be ostracized and marginalized for their inherently antisocial actions. Hate Rand? Sure do. I hate Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Reinhardt Heydrich too. Hating those responsible for fostering evil in the world in the form of exploitation and tyranny is no vice either. Objectivism encourages nothing but tyranny and exploitation of the weak by the strong. Hate objectivists? Not as individuals per se, you have to earn that level of effort hate requires, but as a group?
Yep. Sure do. Just like I hate killers and pedophiles too. Enemies of civilization deserve no less.
I now return you to your natural state, fugue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue_state
fuguewriter,
fuguewriter
1, May 10, 2011 at 5:45 pm
Elaine M. –
> things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
Not all things. Some things. The important things, in Rand’s view.
> 2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
Has absolutely nothing to do with Rand, philosophically or personally.
> 3. Charity is immoral.
Completely false. Try actually reading an author. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/charity.html
> 4. Pay for your own fucking schools.
More like: stop the government from fucking up the economy, which could be so much better under a genuine free market system (including actual money instead of government-controlled paper), and quality education will become highly affordable without the need for government schools. Incidentally, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You think we’re not all paying, far too much, for government schools?
**********
I didn’t write that. I was quoting Matt Taibbi. You should address your comments to him–not to me.
********************
“The Hickman claim is yet another piece of Internet disinformation.”
**********
Prove it.
**********
I think you need to read more about “bubbles” and deregulation and mortgage-backed securities and Credit Default Swaps and Collateralized Debt Obligations and the shenanigans on Wall Street and what the real causes of the near meltdown of our financial system were.
P.S. The government doesn’t force people to be greedy. They choose to be greedy of their own volition.
Elaine M. –
> Goldman Sachs … greed-is-good ethos
The more fundamental ethos of our time, which helped make the inflationary bubble of the late 1990s and the 2000s possible, is that money-is-paper. Without paper money, all of that nonsense would have been impossible. *Physically* impossible. Assign blame where blame is due: government established the basic premise.
Swarthmore mom –
Ryan railed at the NLRB (which should not exist at all) for telling a private company in which state they could operate based on what supposedly will benefit the workers. There’s a name for that, and it’s not capitalism.
Elaine M. –
> things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
Not all things. Some things. The important things, in Rand’s view.
> 2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
Has absolutely nothing to do with Rand, philosophically or personally.
> 3. Charity is immoral.
Completely false. Try actually reading an author. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/charity.html
> 4. Pay for your own fucking schools.
More like: stop the government from fucking up the economy, which could be so much better under a genuine free market system (including actual money instead of government-controlled paper), and quality education will become highly affordable without the need for government schools. Incidentally, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You think we’re not all paying, far too much, for government schools?
Elaine M. –
The Hickman claim is yet another piece of Internet disinformation. It comes from a chopped-up excerpting of a few pages of Rand’s private journals [i.e., notes to oneself] when she was barely out of her teens, fresh from the bloodbath of Soviet Russia, and the excerpting still omits all kinds of qualifications and negative judgments she expressed about Hickman (who at the time she was writing was legally still an innocent man, anyway). Her final summary of him is that he was a criminal and a repulsive pervert and not worthy of what he had suggested to her.
This is what comes of copying Internet attack sites.
Frank –
You’re spreading disinformation. What a shock. The net is full of it.
Rand’s family was Jewish bourgeois pharmacists and such existing under the Pale of Settlement – hardly wealthy. She published as Ayn Rand beginning in the 1930s. No evidence of psychosis, any more than of sociopathy. She did not believe in the “law of the jungle” [which doesn’t exist in jungled either]. She was not a Social Darwinist of any kind – she held that statism hurts people on the bottom of the social pyramid and that it’s to everyone’s benefit to leave innovators and creators free. You can argue she is wrong if you like, but this is what she said. She believed in absolutely uniform individual rights for every single human being. Hardly a vicious “law of the jungle.” There is no “Rand Society” – you’re talking about the Ayn Rand Institute. They have no connection *whatsoever* to the Birchers and the other unidentified groups you allude to. ARI does not give novels to “teen boys” – they distribute them upon request to schools and run essay contests. The former Fed chairman’s name is “Alan Greenspan,” became one of her supporters long after he had graduated from college, and the rumor about having had an affair with Rand is an Internet rumor with no known foundation.
Typical level of accuracy about Rand. Try actually getting to know her system of thought, then critique it.
Buddha Is Laughing –
1. Social Security, according to the government, is a lock-box trust fund of one’s own money. So it’s not government *aid*.
2. Rand never said everyone should surrender monies taken by the government to the government. Ever. On the contrary, she said publicly that everyone should take back what has been taken and fight for the end of those programs. She makes one of her characters in “Atlas Shrugged” – Ragnar – do just that.
> “no valid caveats to deviate from said basic principles”
And none of you have shown that she did. Her basic principles don’t say “surrender money the government took from you,” nor can such a maxim be derived from them. She never said “Everyone, stop using government programs *right now* or you are evil.” She said the opposite, and practiced it.
> Do as I say
The onus is on you to prove that she said it. She didn’t. She publicly said *the opposite*, so at worst she was inconsistent. (And she was not, in this.)
> we also know that’s bullshit too
Then get to proving it.
> Taxation is not theft
In other words, you impatiently brush across what she actually thought. You have jumped from unproved hypocrisy to “Nyah nyah she was wrong.”
> promoting the general welfare of society
“of society” is not in the Constitution, bub. And the general welfare spoken of was not a collectivist, rights-violating thing. The ultimate general welfare is a free society in which individual rights are respected. That’s a basic principle.
> ass back to Russia or to some third country
Thank you for revealing your hate so clearly.
Elaine,
Greed is God to Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Banksters.
More from Matt Taibbi on Rand’s philosophy:
Will Goldman Sachs prove greed is God?
The investment bank’s cult of self-interest is on trial against the whole idea of civilisation – the collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even if we can
By Matt Taibbi
The Guardian, Saturday 24 April 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/24/will-goldman-prove-greed-is-god
Excerpt:
So Goldman Sachs, the world’s greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally, the case hangs on a technicality.
Morally, however, the Goldman Sachs case may turn into a final referendum on the greed-is-good ethos that conquered America sometime in the 80s – and in the years since has aped other horrifying American trends such as boybands and reality shows in spreading across the western world like a venereal disease.
When Britain and other countries were engulfed in the flood of defaults and derivative losses that emerged from the collapse of the American housing bubble two years ago, few people understood that the crash had its roots in the lunatic greed-centered objectivist religion, fostered back in the 50s and 60s by ponderous emigre novelist Ayn Rand.
While, outside of America, Russian-born Rand is probably best known for being the unfunniest person western civilisation has seen since maybe Goebbels or Jack the Ripper (63 out of 100 colobus monkeys recently forced to read Atlas Shrugged in a laboratory setting died of boredom-induced aneurysms), in America Rand is upheld as an intellectual giant of limitless wisdom. Here in the States, her ideas are roundly worshipped even by people who’ve never read her books or even heard of her. The rightwing “Tea Party” movement is just one example of an entire demographic that has been inspired to mass protest by Rand without even knowing it.
Last summer I wrote a brutally negative article about Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone magazine (I called the bank a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”) that unexpectedly sparked a heated national debate. On one side of the debate were people like me, who believed that Goldman is little better than a criminal enterprise that earns its billions by bilking the market, the government, and even its own clients in a bewildering variety of complex financial scams.
On the other side of the debate were the people who argued Goldman wasn’t guilty of anything except being “too smart” and really, really good at making money. This side of the argument was based almost entirely on the Randian belief system, under which the leaders of Goldman Sachs appear not as the cheap swindlers they look like to me, but idealised heroes, the saviours of society.
In the Randian ethos, called objectivism, the only real morality is self-interest, and society is divided into groups who are efficiently self-interested (ie, the rich) and the “parasites” and “moochers” who wish to take their earnings through taxes, which are an unjust use of force in Randian politics. Rand believed government had virtually no natural role in society. She conceded that police were necessary, but was such a fervent believer in laissez-faire capitalism she refused to accept any need for economic regulation – which is a fancy way of saying we only need law enforcement for unsophisticated criminals.
Rand’s fingerprints are all over the recent Goldman story. The case in question involves a hedge fund financier, John Paulson, who went to Goldman with the idea of a synthetic derivative package pegged to risky American mortgages, for use in betting against the mortgage market. Paulson would short the package, called Abacus, and Goldman would then sell the deal to suckers who would be told it was a good bet for a long investment. The SEC’s contention is that Goldman committed a crime – a “failure to disclose” – when they failed to tell the suckers about the role played by the vulture betting against them on the other side of the deal.
Now, the instruments in question in this deal – collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps – fall into the category of derivatives, which are virtually unregulated in the US thanks in large part to the effort of gremlinish former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who as a young man was close to Rand and remained a staunch Randian his whole life. In the late 90s, Greenspan lobbied hard for the passage of a law that came to be called the Commodity Futures Modernisation Act of 2000, a monster of a bill that among other things deregulated the sort of interest-rate swaps Goldman used in its now-infamous dealings with Greece.
Good video Ms. EM.
I must agree with Mike Spindell–you do perform ‘yeowoman’ work on all of your guest posts and again when fleshing out others’ comments.
Here’s a little song about Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand from 2008:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/05/in-dc-nikki-haley-takes-labor-fight-to-national-stage.php?ref=fpa Rand Paul rants at the NLRB for siding with the unions.
I left the following comment at Nal’s post about Ayn Rand and Christianity.
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/04/23/ayn-rand-and-christianity/
I think it bears repeating on this thread.
*****
From Chapter 2 (page 41) of “Griftopia” by Matt Taibbi:
“To sum it all up, the Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools.”
“Former Federal LEO 1, May 9, 2011 at 5:41 pm
As a conservative Republican, I think Ayn Rand was an ugly woman with an even uglier ideology.”
FFLEO,
This says it all, succinctly. Elaine has done her usual yeoman work copiously producing varied in depth critiques that destroy the patina of sanity ascribed to Rand. Others have contributed pithy refutations. Nonetheless your sentence sums it all up and in the words of Dorothy Parker “There is no there, there.”
I have no doubt of your credentials as a conservative Republican and yet you find distaste with this essentially ridiculous and unworkable philosophy. Ayn Rand was a sociopathic egomaniac as detailed by the man she called her “intellectual heir,” Nathaniel Brandon. Her pseudo philosophy is attractive to those who have dire need to justify their own self-centered behavior
and expose their lack of self awareness in the process.
Ah. So, the simple analysis of Ayn Rand, and her acolytes, is that she’s Voldemort, and her followers are Death Eaters.
The Truth About GOP Hero Ayn Rand
The philosophy that Rand laid out in her novels and essays was a frightful concoction of hyper-egotism, power-worship and anarcho-capitalism.
http://www.alternet.org/story/150680/the_truth_about_gop_hero_ayn_rand?page=1
Excerpt:
RAND’S PHILOSOPHY
The philosophy, such as it was, which Rand laid out in her novels and essays was a frightful concoction of hyper-egotism, power-worship and anarcho-capitalism. She opposed all forms of welfare, unemployment insurance, support for the poor and middle-class, regulation of industry and government provision for roads or other infrastructure. She also insisted that law enforcement, defense and the courts were the only appropriate arenas for government, and that all taxation should be purely voluntary. Her view of economics starkly divided the world into a contest between “moochers” and “producers,” with the small group making up the latter generally composed of the spectacularly wealthy, the successful, and the titans of industry. The “moochers” were more or less everyone else, leading TNR’s Jonathan Chait to describe Rand’s thinking as a kind of inverted Marxism. Marx considered wealth creation to result solely from the labor of the masses, and viewed the owners of capital and the economic elite to be parasites feeding off that labor. Rand simply reversed that value judgment, applying the role of “parasite” to everyday working people instead. On the level of personal behavior, the heroes in Rand’s novels commit borderline rape, blow up buildings, and dynamite oil fields — actions which Rand portrays as admirable and virtuous fulfillments of the characters’ personal will and desires. Her early diaries gush with admiration for William Hickman, a serial killer who raped and murdered a young girl. Hickman showed no understanding of “the necessity, meaning or importance of other people,” a trait Rand apparently found quite admirable. For good measure, Rand dismissed the feminist movement as “false” and “phony,” denigrated both Arabs and Native Americans as “savages” (going so far as to say the latter had no rights and that Europeans were right to take North American lands by force) and expressed horror that taxpayer money was being spent on government programs aimed at educating “subnormal children” and helping the handicapped. Needless to say, when Rand told Mike Wallace in 1953 that altruism was evil, that selfishness is a virtue, and that anyone who succumbs to weakness or frailty is unworthy of love, she meant it.
PAUL RYAN’S AYN RAND BUDGET
Given that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is the lead architect of the GOP’s 2012 budget plan, his own devotion to the ideas of Atlas Shrugged and its author are worth noting. Conservative columnist Ross Douthat has dismissed the connection as Ryan merely saying some “kind words about Ayn Rand,” which simply isn’t a plausible characterization given what we know: Ryan was a speaker at the Ayn Rand Centenary Conference in 2005, where he described Social Security as a “collectivist system” and cited Rand as his primary inspiration for entering public service. He has at least two videos on his Facebook page in which he heaps praise on the author. “Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism,” he says. All of which reflects a rather more serious devotion than a few mere kind words. So it should come as no surprise that Ryan’s plan comports almost perfectly with Rand’s world view. He guts Medicare, Medicaid, and a whole host of housing, food, and educational support programs, leaving the country’s middle-class and most vulnerable citizens with far less support. Then he uses approximately half of the money freed by those cuts to reduce taxes on the most wealthy Americans. By transforming Medicare into a system of vouchers whose value increases at the rate of inflation, he undoes Medicare’s most humane feature — the shouldering of risk at the social level — and leaves individuals and seniors to shoulder ever greater amounts of risk on their own. But if your intellectual and moral lodestar is a woman who railed against altruism as “evil” and considered the small pockets of highly successful individuals to be morally superior, it’s a perfectly logical plan to put forward.
By Mark Ames (2/26/2010)
Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer
Her works are treated as gospel by right-wing powerhouses like Alan Greenspan and Clarence Thomas, but Ayn Rand found early inspiration in 1920’s murderer William Hickman.
http://www.alternet.org/books/145819/ayn_rand,_hugely_popular_author_and_inspiration_to_right-wing_leaders,_was_a_big_admirer_of_serial_killers
Excerpt:
There’s something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be so hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population that thought like this, but the U.S. is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?
It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the U.S.
One reason most countries don’t find the time to embrace Ayn Rand’s thinking is that she is a textbook sociopath. In her notebooks Ayn Rand worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of “ideal man” she promoted in her more famous books. These ideas were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America’s most recent economic catastrophe — former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox — along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate “entitlement programs” increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked Atlas Shrugged as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after the Bible.
The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand’s beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation — Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street — on him.
What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.'”