Paul Ryan: Poor People Need Jesus, Not Food Stamps

[Cha]

30. What I heard.. and, I also heard that she got SS and medicare when

she got sick.

If Ayn Needed Medicare, How Can We Do Without?

snip//

"In 2011, news broke that notorious libertarian/objectivist Ayn Rand had accepted Social Security and Medicare in the 1970s after she was diagnosed with lung cancer (unsurprisingly she was a cigarette-cancer connection denier). Among liberal circles, a lot of attention was paid to the hypocrisy angle of all this (and much more to taking SS cheques than enrolling in Medicare). A person who spent her life railing against collectivism and dependency accepting the benefits of the very programs her beliefs called "evil."

Hypocrisy isn't the important thing here. Ideological failure is.

To the defenders of Rand, the most common reply is that Rand had paid into these programs through her involuntarily seized taxes, and if she was going to be forced ("at gunpoint" as libertarians always say) to pay for these programs, why shouldn't she at least get something back from them? Actually, I don't really disagree with that. Liberals didn't support the Bush tax cuts, but I doubt many liberals gave back the government the extra taxes they would have had to pay under the Clinton rates after the tax cuts passed. You're not typically morally obligated to martyr yourself for your beliefs.

No, the really important fact that this episode reveals is not Rand's hypocrisy, but the utter failure of her ideas. Even she couldn't live without the social safety net. Here's how the woman who persuaded her to take part in socialism explained it to a fellow objectivist in 1998 (emphasis added)"

More..
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/16/1121029/-If-Ayn-Needed-Medicare-How-Can-We-Do-Without

Paul Ryan threw "Jesus" in there because he knew it would go over better than his personal hero.