http://firedoglake.com/2011/01/27/tea-party-patron-saint-ayn-rand-applied-for-social-security-medicare-benefits/



Critics of Social Security and Medicare frequently invoke the words and ideals of author and philosopher Ayn Rand, one of the fiercest critics of federal insurance programs. But a little-known fact is that Ayn Rand herself collected Social Security. She may also have received Medicare benefits.

An interview recently surfaced that was conducted in 1998 by the Ayn Rand Institute with a social worker who says she helped Rand and her husband, Frank O’Connor, sign up for Social Security and Medicare in 1974.

Federal records obtained through a Freedom of Information act request confirm the Social Security benefits.

Collectivist! Dagny Taggart weeps.

And before any glibertarians come back with “but…but…she paid into it so there’s no hypocrisy” in comments, Rand herself wrote,



There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

Adding an extra layer of crow to the deliciousness, the Ayn Rand Center for the Center for F*ck You I Got Mine Individual Rights has an article on its website right now titled, “Social Security is Immoral.”

IOKIYARand.

(h/t PW)

its not hypocritical of her to do that. in fact it capitalistic, its the non retarded thing to do. 

if the social welfare systems are already in place, why not take advantage of them.

i can be against the government giving out FREE cellphones to everybody, but you better believe i will be the first one in line for my free cellphone if they are in the area.

The Former Democratic Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton is a Right Wing news source? 

What about the Huff Post?   That's not a rightwing news source right?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/14/erskine-bowles-paul-ryan_n_1775313.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012

The Ryan plan puts us in debt for 30 years....   The plans proposede by Obama and Biden put us in debt for much much longer.

So I don't really see the point.

Outside that the Ryan plan puts us in much less debt.

Also... I think you posted the wrong News Article... because that one paints Paul Ryan as a hard working, put down opon guy who is polite, only talks about facts, never plays dirty politics and who's greatest weakness is that he actually wants to put out ideas rather then just critisize.

While it Charactizes the Whitehouse administration as twofaced and unwilling to compromise/discuss policy even after saying they would and specifically luring him to a speech to put him in the front row just so he could chastise him upfront and on camera.

Whie Ryan himeslf removed controversial aspects after hearings with his fellow congressmen.

I mean, you may not agree with his positions, but that article makes Paul Ryan seem like one of the few honest straight foward men in Congress.

I guess he can be my example now that Good Old Dennis Kusnich is bowing out due to redistricting, and dirty politics from his democratic primary candidate.

I'll miss Dennis!  His honestly and straightfowardness is why I always voted for him. (Lived in his district.)

As for being a Mod.  I don't ban people for disagreeing with me.

I ban people for flaming and posting insults... and it's not like that was your first ban.

EDIT: Oh, and by the way.  For what it's worth I also believe Ayn Rand is awful.

Sometimes you wonder if Walken is producing this year's election, too. In Mitt Romney, the GOP has nominated its least ideological candidate since Richard Nixon. At every turn, the party has demanded, "More ideology! I gotta have more ideology!" With the selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has now acceded to that wish. The least ideological Republican candidate since 1968 has committed himself to the most ideological Republican program since 1964.

Democrats must be stunned.

The first battle in every election is the battle to decide what the election is about. What's the question voters must answer?



Rep. Paul Ryan's Wisconsin homecoming
In 1992, for example, Republicans wanted the election to be about George H.W. Bush's steady leadership in a dangerous world: the end of the Cold War and victory in the Persian Gulf. Democrats countered, "It's the economy, stupid!"

This year, an incumbent even more embattled than George H.W. Bush has his own preferred election theme. He doesn't want to debate his own record, which is pretty dismal. He wants to debate the record of the congressional Republicans elected in 2010, a bunch radically less popular even than the president himself.

You'd imagine that Romney's job was to refuse the Democratic invitation, to choose his own ground for the election, and to keep his distance from the congressional GOP. You'd imagine, but you'd be wrong.

Romney has instead chosen to bolt himself to the House Republicans. He has chosen as his running mate Paul Ryan, the House Republican leader -- not their formal leader, but their intellectual leader, the person who set their agenda. He has effectively adopted Paul Ryan's agenda as his own: big immediate cuts in spending, a dramatic cut in the top rate of income tax to 28% and a bold reform of Medicare for those 55 and under.

Obama's message in 2012: "Forget the economy. It's Medicare, stupid!"

The Romney-Ryan response? "We agree. Medicare it is."

William Bennett: Why Paul Ryan?

The Romney-Ryan team will tell you that fixing Medicare is crucial to their plans for economic growth. By assuring markets that Medicare costs will grow more slowly after 2023, a Medicare fix -- it's argued -- will ignite job creation in 2013. In the meantime, federal spending cuts and upper-income tax cuts will restore business confidence.

Will voters accept this argument? Possibly, although relatively few economists will do so.

Most economists would draw a distinction between the government's fiscal problems over the medium term and the economy's problems in the near term. The economy's near-term problems can be traced to the housing crisis.

Americans assumed crushing levels of debt in the 2000s to buy expensive homes, homes they assumed would continue to rise in price forever. In 2007, household debt relative to income peaked at the highest level since 1928. (Uh oh.) When the housing market crashed, consumers were stranded with unsustainable debts, and until those debts are reduced, consumers will drastically cut back their spending. As consumers cut back, businesses lose revenue. As businesses lose revenue, they fire employees. As employees lose their jobs, their purchasing power is reduced. As purchasing power is lost throughout the economy, housing prices tumble again.

Rinse and repeat.

Opinion: Is Paul Ryan for or against Ayn Rand?

Since 2008, the debt burden on households has declined somewhat, partly because of increased saving, mostly because of mortgage default. But household debts have declined nowhere near enough, and the pace of household debt reduction is slowing.

The result: slow recovery of the private economy, weak consumer demand, paltry job growth -- considerably offset by continuing job shrinkage in the public sector.

Paul Ryan's various plans and road maps contain many interesting elements for the reduction of government in the decades ahead. They do not respond to the most immediate and urgent problem: prolonged mass unemployment caused by heavy household debt.

Why not? There's why the ideology makes itself felt. Conservatives ardently believe that big future deficits are the cause of today's unemployment. They feel it. They know it. And they don't want to hear different.

When naysayers worry that the Romney campaign has over-indulged the ideology, the answer quickly comes: "Well, Reagan was ideological in 1980 -- and he still won. Why can't Romney do the same, especially since the economy is even worse now than it was then?"

Opinion: Ryan will shift the campaign dynamic

Fair answer. Here's the difference: Although Ronald Reagan was a highly ideological candidate, he did not run a highly ideological campaign. Quite the contrary! Precisely because party conservatives trusted Reagan's ideological commitment, they allowed him space to move to the center.

Seeking the GOP nomination in 1976, Reagan had pledged large immediate cuts in federal spending ($90 billion, at a time when that was a lot of money). In 1980, Reagan emphasized an easier-to-swallow message of tax cuts, not spending cuts -- and indeed promised that he'd protect the Medicare program he'd opposed when it was created in the mid-1960s.

No such leeway for Mitt Romney. He has been constrained first to endorse Paul Ryan's budget plan (which he did in December 2011 after months of attempted evasion), to endorse a cut in the top rate of income tax to 28% (March 2012), and now finally to choose Ryan himself as his running mate. No leeway -- and now no exit.

Conservatives exult that the GOP will now offer the country "a choice, not a referendum." That phrase does not make a lot of sense. (What is more of a choice than a referendum?) But there's good reason why conservatives say it. They are looking for a rephrasing of the slogan uppermost in their minds: "a choice not an echo" -- the title of the best-selling manifesto that helped persuade Republicans to follow Barry Goldwater to disaster.

Even CNN is all over the Paul Ryan-Ayn Rand thing - and it ain't pretty!

People don't generally care what politicians read. But Rep. Paul Ryan is different. His fascination with the Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand could spell trouble for the GOP's new vice-presidential candidate. It could put him at odds with the Christian right and the Roman Catholic Church.

It all depends how much you believe that he is in the thrall of Ayn Rand.

Rand (1905-1982) is controversial because of the extremism of her views. In researching my recent book, I found that Rand's influence on the Republican Party, which dates back as far as her endorsement of Wendell Willkie in 1940, has been sharply growing, largely due to her vise-like hold on the imagination of the tea party and people like Ryan.

Rand was the author of two best-selling novels, "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged." These books, along with her other novels and essays, set forth an ideology which she called objectivism. Her books have sold in the millions and appeal to people ranging from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to the rock band Rush. (Rush's lyricist and drummer, Neil Peart, only this year renounced his interest in Rand, three decades after writing the songs her work inspired.)

Gary Weiss

College students notoriously go through an "Ayn Rand phase" because her books emphasize self-reliance and breaking away from one's parents. For most people, it's a kind of literary infatuation. But for a few, Rand becomes a lifelong passion.

Bennett: Why Paul Ryan?

What made her books controversial is not violence or sex, though both "Fountainhead" and "Atlas" have their share of bodice-ripping, but an extremist vision of America that celebrated greed and selfishness, rejected altruism as "evil" and opposed the fundamental tenets of Judeo-Christian morality. (She was also a militant atheist who favored abortion.)

Paul Ryan says that he read her books as a youth but was not influenced by her. In April, he gave an interview to National Review in which he repudiated Rand entirely. In the interview, he called reports of his adherence to Rand's views an "urban legend" and said that he was more deeply influenced by his Roman Catholic faith and by Thomas Aquinas.

Paul Ryan heckled at Iowa State Fair

Lizza: Nov. race about government vision

Velshi talks VP candidacy with Ryan

Explain it to me: Ryan's Medicare plan

But that's not the way he was talking in 2005, when he gave a speech to the Atlas Society, a group dedicated to promoting Rand's beliefs.

In that speech, Ryan said, "I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are and what my beliefs are. It's inspired me so much that it's required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff."

He went on to say that "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. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism."

Avlon: Paul Ryan will shift the campaign dynamic

Ryan very succinctly summed up the Randian worldview in those remarks. Rand painted the world in stark terms, as a struggle between the individual and the collective.

In "The Fountainhead," which was published in 1943, her hero was an architect, Howard Roark, who pursued his vision despite opposition from the media and the architectural establishment. He dislikes money and status and is solely focused on seeing his vision expressed through his work. He even allows another architect to take the credit for a public housing project that he designed. But when the project is not built according to his wishes, he blows it up.

The book was widely denounced as amoral when it came out, but it had enough wide appeal that it was adapted into a 1949 movie with Gary Cooper as Roark and Patricia Neal as his love interest. But the stir that it caused when it came out was nothing like the explosion of fury that greeted "Atlas Shrugged" when it was published in 1957. That book advanced her belief that laissez-faire capitalism, unsullied by government interference or regulation, was the only moral social system.

Unlike the sometimes impoverished architect in "Fountainhead," the heroes of "Atlas Shrugged" were millionaires and industrialists, depicted as a degraded class who had to strike to throw off the yoke of oppression. The heroes of that book included a noble railroad heiress, Dagny Taggart, and a struggling steel tycoon, Hank Rearden, but they are overshadowed by a character who emerges toward the end, John Galt, an inventor who leads the downtrodden 1% on a strike.

Castellanos: Paul Ryan and Gen X GOP

Rand further expounded on her beliefs in essays that were published in her newsletters, and in anthologies with titles like "The Virtue of Selfishness" and "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal." The latter, first published in 1966, contained three essays by Alan Greenspan, one of which argued forcefully against all forms of regulation, even building codes. These essays were published by Rand and reflected her thinking. His strident essays for that book, which he has never repudiated or withdrawn from publication, were echoed by his actions in the 1990s as a principal supporter of financial deregulation in his capacity as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

In a famous appearance before a congressional committee in 2008, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, asked Greenspan, "Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?" Greenspan conceded that there was a "flaw" in his belief system, which was widely cited as a repudiation of Rand, who was his friend for 30 years.

In April 2010, appearing before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, he denied that he had ever repudiated his ideology. "The flaw in the system that I acknowledged was an inability to fully understand the state and extent of potential risks that were as yet untested," he said.

Granderson: Why America doesn't like Mitt Romney

Greenspan didn't mention Rand by name, but in an interview that same month he was asked if the financial crisis was "an indictment of Ayn Rand and the view that laissez-faire capitalism can be expected to function properly, that markets can be trusted to police themselves?" His response: "Not at all."

Ryan's effort to put daylight between himself and Rand also reeks of history-rewriting. Certainly the speech he gave before the Atlas Society in 2005, in which he toed the Randian line, was no "urban legend." Ryan is no atheist, but atheism was at the core of her philosophy, because the teachings of the Bible simply do not jibe with her belief that selfishness is moral, greed is good and altruism is evil. It's not surprising that Ryan's budget plan, which cuts programs for the poor and middle class while imposing no new taxes on the rich, has been criticized by some in the Roman Catholic Church.

Paul Ryan can either be an objectivist or a Christian. He can't have it both ways. He faces a serious problem among Christians, moderate Republicans and others who dislike Rand's views if his expressions of support for Rand are believed, rather than his denials.

How do you feel about Romney selecting Ryan as his running mate? Share with us on CNN iReport.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/14/opinion/weiss-ryan-rand/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

I'd hardly call Ryan straightfoward when both he and Romney are accusing Obama of cutting Medicare, while maintaining the same cuts in Ryan's own budget.

Ryan's budget proposal came after Obamacare was already law, so that's hardly a disingenuous line of argument if he's working from the existing CBO baseline. But sticking Ryan's budget on Romney is pretty disingenuous, since Romney's position is to repeal Obamacare in its entirety including the cuts to Medicare.

I beleive Ryan was accusing him of being twofaced for accusing him of wanting to cut medicare, when Obama himself cut Medicare.

Which brings up an interseting question is... why haven't you turned that round?  Afterall, Obama is accusing Paul Ryan of cutting Medicare, when he himself already did cut it.

I agree there should be a better plan then the Paul Ryan plan to cut the deficit.

The only problem is... nobody has a better plan.

There was Simpson-Bowles, but Obama disregarded it... and his counter plan was so inept, not even Erksine could get behind it.

And i mean, to show that he hasn't suddenly just jumped the Democratic band wagon...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-romneys-tax-plan-wont-cut-the-deficit/2012/08/09/37fb2d20-e19c-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_story.html?hpid=z3

So it's not like he still isn't steadly democratic.

He just recognizes that Paul Ryan so far is the only one to have come out with a solution outside of the Simpson Bowles commission, and is the only one taking the deficit serious... and because HE is taking it serious, for once he's not in "Rally behind the camp" mode.

It's often why I tend to defend republican candidates here, even though I've never actually voted for a Republican, and Mitt Romney is about last on my list of candidates I plan to vote for.

Republicans are adressing serious issues, that democrats want to ignore or even worse, make light of.

This isn't really true.

http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/budget-for-all/

There's a fairly fleshed out alternative budget. I'm not a fan, but it's there. Obama ignores its existence.

It's a fleshed out alternative budget... but it's not a serious one.

It's why Obama, and Bowles for that matter ignore it.

The numbers for it say it saves money close to Ryans because the study they commisoned suggests

A) Ryan's economic plan would destroy US Economic Growth

and

B) The CPC plan would RAPDIDLY increase economic growth via job growth through the same policies, that haven't rapidly been increasing job growth.

Said study was given by the CPC to  a three team panel of young economists who happen to all belong to Liberal think tanks.

This is different in comparison to Simpson-Bowles, and Paul Ryans plan.  Which generally faced actual rigourus bi-partisan testing.

Paul Ryan's plan having done so because it's mostly from the Wyden-Ryan plan, Wyden being a Democrat.

Anyone can project a balanced budget if they get to pick their own GDP growth.

Obama has a fleshed out plan too.  It just doesn't save nearly as much as the ryan plan.  As Bowles points out.

Honestly, i'd perfer the country just inacts Simpson-Bowles and be done with it.   Sadly Obama always seems to charter these bi-partisian problem solving councils... then just completely ignore their results.