Very Serious Liar, Paul Ryan
by digby
If you ever questioned whether the Very Serious Paul Ryan was a dishonest weasel, this should end it:
CONSTITUENT: My question concerns your current and previous feelings toward the author and philosopher Ayn Rand. […] Mr. Ryan, are you telling us that your political career was founded on the concepts of a rally of hers, but until recently, you never realized Ayn Rand was an outspoken atheist, that she felt altruism was evil, supported abortion, and condemned Christianity for advocating compassion for the poor?
RYAN: […] Just because you like someone’s novels doesn’t mean you agree with their entire worldview philosophy. She has a worldview philosophy which is completely antithetical to mine because she has an atheist philosophy. […] It’s really kind of a canard, is what I would say.
CONSTITUENT: You spoke as a keynote speaker for Ayn Rand banquets. You were quoted at length about how you loved her. You say you grew up and Ayn Rand taught you who you are and what your values are. I think we’ve learned the question of your honesty.
RYAN: It’s a great book! It’s a great book! Let’s go on to somebody over here, I think we’ve covered it pretty well. By the way, I don’t require it. I have a reading list. Lots of young people ask me what are good books. I give them Alexis de Tocqueville, I take the Founders, Friedman, Hayek, Atlas Shrugged. There are lots of good books worth reading if you want to study freedom, free enterprise, the Founders, economics. There are a lot of good books out there to read, it doesn’t mean that you subscribe to the person’s worldview and philosophy. That’s really kind of a stretch.
As everyone who reads this blog has known for years, that it total bullshit. Ryan is just lying. I hope people dog him with this for the rest of the campaign.
But there’s also this:
GLENN BECK: Nice to meet you, sir. Tell me, tell me your thoughts on progressivism.
PAUL RYAN: Right. What I have been trying to do, and if you read the entire Oklahoma speech or read my speech to Hillsdale College that they put in there on Primus Magazine, you can get them on my Facebook page, what I’ve been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today and so to me it’s really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate.
GLENN: I love you.
PAUL RYAN: So people can actually see what this ideology means and where it’s going to lead us and how it attacks the American idea.
GLENN: Okay. Hang on just a second. I ‑‑ did you see my speech at CPAC?
PAUL RYAN: I’ve read it. I didn’t see it. I’ve read it, a transcript of it.
GLENN: And I think we’re saying the same thing. I call it ‑‑
PAUL RYAN: We are saying the same thing.
GLENN: It’s a cancer.
PAUL RYAN: Exactly. Look, I come from ‑‑ I’m calling you from Janesville, Wisconsin where I’m born and raised.
GLENN: Holy cow.
PAUL RYAN: Where we raise our family, 35 miles from Madison. I grew up hearing about this stuff. This stuff came from these German intellectuals to Madison‑University of Wisconsin and sort of out there from the beginning of the last century. So this is something we are familiar with where I come from. It never sat right with me. And as I grew up, I learned more about the founders and reading the Austrians and others that this is really a cancer because it basically takes the notion that our rights come from God and nature and turns it on its head and says, no, no, no, no, no, they come from government, and we here in government are here to give you your rights and therefore ration, redistribute and regulate your rights. It’s a complete affront of the whole idea of this country and that is to me what we as conservatives, or classical liberals if you want to get technical.
GLENN: Thank you.
Technically, according to Rand, progressivism isn’t a cancer, it’s a “parasitic” disease, but you get the drift. He did mention God in there, which is de rigeur for all Republicans, even when it makes no sense, but it’s pretty clear that he isn’t quoting the Bible. In fact, with his reference to “classical liberalism” he’s obviously crudely identifying himself in the way that many Randroid libertarians do.
And keep in mind that Ryan hasn’t just made a fetish out of Rand’s far-out economic theories, he’s held it up as a moral system as well, which is hardcore Objectivism in its purest form:
Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and this to me is what matters most. It is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big or the health care plan doesn’t work for this or that policy reason. It is the morality of what is occurring right now and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack. And it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on, which we need that kind of comment more than ever.
Here’s someone with some clearer thoughts on all this: John Maynard Keynes:
It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities. There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide.
It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately.
We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail what Burke termed “one of the finest problems in legislation, namely, to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion”…
That’s what the argument has always been about and it’s an argument that never ends. The morality underlying all of it places Rand at one end and Jesus at the other. Ryan cannot have it both ways.
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