Atlas Spurned: Ayn Rand Wouldn't Approve of Paul Ryan

[salvorhardin]

Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, reflects on Paul Ryan's tremulous relationship with Ayn Rand's ideas.

Mr. Ryan’s youthful, feverish embrace of Rand and his clumsy attempts to distance himself from her is more than the flip-flopping of an ambitious politician: it is a window into the ideological fissures at the heart of modern conservatism.

Rand’s atheism and social libertarianism have long placed her in an uneasy position in the pantheon of conservative heroes, but she has proved irresistible to those who came of age in the baby boom and after. They found her iconoclasm thrilling, and her admirers poured into Barry M. Goldwater’s doomed 1964 presidential campaign, the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute. After her death, in 1982, it became even easier for her admirers to ignore the parts of her message they didn’t like and focus on her advocacy of unfettered capitalism and her celebration of the individual.

Mr. Ryan is particularly taken by Rand’s black-and-white worldview. “The fight we are in here,” he once told a group of her adherents, “is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” If she were alive, he said, Rand would do “a great job in showing us just how wrong what government is doing is.”

Rand’s anti-government argument rested on another binary opposition, between “producers” who create wealth and “moochers” who feed off them. This theme has endeared Rand, and Mr. Ryan, to the Tea Party, whose members believe they are the only ones who deserve government aid.

Full oped: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/opinion/ayn-rand-wouldnt-approve-of-paul-ryan.html

[FSogol]

1. Don't be too sure, someone will need to drive the Oscar Meyer Wiener-mobile around Galt's Gulch.

Why not Ryan?

[erpowers]

2. Wondered About Libertarians and Governmental Politics

At one point in the piece Jennifer Burns stated Ayn Rand would have hated the idea of public service. I wondered if a true Libertarian could go into governmental politics. No matter how you talk about it governmental politics deals with allocating taxpayer money. If you take government money to help your district it seems like you would be going against Libertarian ideas.

[MrBrooks2]

4. No.

Some of the characters in Galt's Gulch were public officials. A judge comes to mind, because at the end of the book he wrote a new constitution for the new society. Ayn Rand wouldn't have been critical of honest politicians that worked to protect political and economic freedoms.

[MrBrooks2]

3. Hm

Ryan rejected parts of Ayn Rand's philosophy, and embraced other parts. Either way, Rand made a point of not endorsing any political party during her lifetime so the whole point is moot.

[Ruby the Liberal]

5. She just made a point about Greed being Good, while

living on Social Security and Medicare.

[Kennah]

6. Posting privileges revoked in 5, 4, 3 ...