Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand

[atlasshrugged]

Consider, in perspective, what's happened: an ideology (partly inspired by Rand--remember dopey Alan Greenspan?) of deregulation and unbridled capitalism brought the world to the brink of economic collapse in 2008. Four years later, the Republican Party has now openly embraced a full-throated Randian ideology. This country has learned nothing. If Obama does not rise to this occasion, and launch a full-throttled attack on this ideology, he will go down in history as the most craven coward in American politics."

What a joke of a comment? The moochers in Rand's books would say the same thing. The market crashed in 2008, not due to failures of capitalism, but because the government felt it was "the right" of every American to have a home more expensive than they could afford. Then when neither the buyers nor the builders were willing to pay the difference, people went bankrupt. Now people want to use this as an excuse that more bills should be passed concerning our economy?

Anyone who's read Atlas Shrugged can see that this is painfully similar to Wesley Mouch's point of view.

Also, you posted a link to that ridiculous article attempting to discredit Rand as inhumane by stating that she somehow finds a thrill in stupid people dying. If you bother to read the book and not the propaganda concerning it, you'll see that she's just illustrating that all the people on the train share the same twisted ideology as the railroad workers who get them killed. It's not about them deserving to die, it's just pointing out that they would have made the same decision that got them killed. You know... like foolish citizens who are being ruined by the politicians but who would do the same things if elected.

 

[Katzndogz]

Consider, in perspective, what's happened: an ideology (partly inspired by Rand--remember dopey Alan Greenspan?) of deregulation and unbridled capitalism brought the world to the brink of economic collapse in 2008. Four years later, the Republican Party has now openly embraced a full-throated Randian ideology. This country has learned nothing. If Obama does not rise to this occasion, and launch a full-throttled attack on this ideology, he will go down in history as the most craven coward in American politics."

What a joke of a comment? The moochers in Rand's books would say the same thing. The market crashed in 2008, not due to failures of capitalism, but because the government felt it was "the right" of every American to have a home more expensive than they could afford. Then when neither the buyers nor the builders were willing to pay the difference, people went bankrupt. Now people want to use this as an excuse that more bills should be passed concerning our economy?

Anyone who's read Atlas Shrugged can see that this is painfully similar to Wesley Mouch's point of view.

Also, you posted a link to that ridiculous article attempting to discredit Rand as inhumane by stating that she somehow finds a thrill in stupid people dying. If you bother to read the book and not the propaganda concerning it, you'll see that she's just illustrating that all the people on the train share the same twisted ideology as the railroad workers who get them killed. It's not about them deserving to die, it's just pointing out that they would have made the same decision that got them killed. You know... like foolish citizens who are being ruined by the politicians but who would do the same things if elected.

You can make this cogent argument because you have obviously actually read Ayn Rand as opposed by having someone else merely tell you what she meant. Democrats will merely regurgitate what they were told and never actually read her books.

 

[uscitizen]

Anyone who did not like Reagan was unquestionably a communist.

 

[Synthaholic]

Geeze, I'm so GLAD I'm voting for......

Paul Ryan and not that Ayn Rand.

She sounds like a truly horrible person

She is Ryan's idol so sorry to say I think you are voting for her and her political views,

She's my idol too.

Do you idolize her for her militant pro-choice stance?

Or do you idolize her for saying that the family unit is not central to society?

 

[Luddly Neddite]

Personally Ayn Rand offers a view of existence so bleak and heartless one has to wonder at her popularity among many on the right. Whittaker Chambers sums her up in the link in the first URL below.

But the individual as the locus and lord of reality and modern life is a powerful meme in American thought. Only in America could a silly kind of Marxism Libertarianism exist. Americans exist in a sort of fantasy that says all this came about from me, Robinson Crusoe without Friday - without history. So yes, the nonsense Rand wrote serves to continue a myth of magic divorced from responsibility for each other. Odd in a nation that calls itself Christian. 'I got mine, tough for you.'

http://www.usmessageboard.com/clean...on-could-be-a-game-changer-2.html#post5810441
http://www.usmessageboard.com/politics/164072-ayn-rand-conservatives-tea-party-republicans.html
http://www.usmessageboard.com/gener...ult-of-selfishness-on-the-american-right.html


"I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden to this day, and have successfully passed it on to my children. I don’t believe I have the right to an opinion about something I know nothing about—constitutional law, for example, or sailing—a notion that puts me sadly out of step with a growing majority of my countrymen, many of whom may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism, or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don’t believe in it. Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who can tell you, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing rant, and bloggers’ speculation that’s so divorced from actual, demonstrable fact, that’s so not true, as the kids would say, that the mind goes numb with wonder. “Way I see it is,” a man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool told me last summer, “if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.” Mark Slouka 'Harper's'

Rands popularity is really quite simple. Her entire philosphy is that of an adolesent. Selfish greed wedded to an overblown sense of worth. When I was a teen, I found Rands philosphy enthralling. I found it to be correct and exactly what this country needed.

And then I grew up and I put away childish things.

Paul Ryan on the other hand lives on the street he grew up on, his brother only a block away. After his father died, Ryan drew on his fathers social security to help put himself through college, where he double majored in Economics and Political Science. From college, he went straight to work in Washington.

Ryan went straight from his sheltered life in Janesville to work in government. He has never had a private sector job as his primary and only source of income ( he worked as a waiter and a fitness trainer to suppliment his income he recieved from the government. ) . In fact, as his double major indicates, his goal has always been government.


When the 2008 meltdown occured, Paul Ryan voted AGAINST the GM loan. That had consequences. GM closed the plant in his hometown of Janesville, WI. 3800 middle class jobs lost and Ryan did nothing. Though to his credit, Ryan did vote against the extention of unemployemnt benefits for those same 3800 workers.

In his 13 years in the House, Ryan has passed just two pieces of legislation. The first, in 2000, changed the name of a post office, the second, in 2008 while the country was in full on economic meltdown, changed the way an excise tax was levied on arrows.

At a salary of $174,000 a year, the American taxpayer has paid Paul Ryan 2.26 million dollars, or 1.13 million dollars per piece of legislation. At his current rate of production, if Paul Ryan stays in the House, we should expect to see his next great piece of legislation sometime in 2016.

Ryan, as a foloower of Rands philosophy, believes that a man should only be entitled to that which is produced by his own hand. What has Paul Ryans hand produced? Ryan has said that he believes that welfare, unemployment, social security, medicare are all things the governemnt should not be doing. All things that he wishes to privatize, because government is the problem, NOT the solution.

Yet, the government gave him his fathers social security money so Ryan could got to school. Ryan chose majors which would lead him directly into government. He has never had to rely on a private sector paycheck as his main source of income. And the sweat from Paul Ryans brow produced only 2 pieces of legistlation in 13 years.

I really love these succinct and factual posts!

And, truly appreciate the intelligence of Mark Slouka. He's certainly correct about labels being tossed around with no knowledge of their meaning. And, the comment about English being good enough for JC is a hoot. That really is how ignorant people can be.

Ryan has made a career of feeding at the tax funded trough. He hasn't really done much for the US but he'd done plenty to benefit his own pockets. I'm watching a news clip, showing him lying, outright lying. Hopefully, enough people will see that both he and Romney are chronic corrupt liars.

Was gonna add the clapping hands emoticon but that's one of the glitches I have on this board. Stuff just doesn't work very well.

 

[atlasshrugged]

She is Ryan's idol so sorry to say I think you are voting for her and her political views,

She's my idol too.

Do you idolize her for her militant pro-choice stance?

Or do you idolize her for saying that the family unit is not central to society?

Lighten up. Can't we value people for great thought rather than just attack the values we disagree with. It would be difficult to disagree with Rand more than I do on her personal views on families and God, but here views on individualism and hard work were liberating for me. Let people respect others without requiring them to agree on every matter of opinion.

 

[Katzndogz]

She is Ryan's idol so sorry to say I think you are voting for her and her political views,

She's my idol too.

Do you idolize her for her militant pro-choice stance?

Or do you idolize her for saying that the family unit is not central to society?

I idolize her for this:

A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

Government “help” to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.

I am not a democrat, so I am still able to exercise judgment and freedom of forming my own opinions. I am not obligated to agree with everything Rand says, even though much of what I am told by democrats is a lie.

What Rand had to say about fascism in her own essay, as opposed to what democrats say she said.

Fascism/Nazism — Ayn Rand Lexicon

Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution in any crisis—and “the public good” is the altar on which victims are immolated. But there are stylistic differences of emphasis. The socialist-communist axis keeps promising to achieve abundance, material comfort and security for its victims, in some indeterminate future. The fascist-Nazi axis scorns material comfort and security, and keeps extolling some undefined sort of spiritual duty, service and conquest. The socialist-communist axis offers its victims an alleged social ideal. The fascist-Nazi axis offers nothing but loose talk about some unspecified form of racial or national “greatness.” The socialist-communist axis proclaims some grandiose economic plan, which keeps receding year by year. The fascist-Nazi axis merely extols leadership—leadership without purpose, program or direction—and power for power’s sake.

Rather than sounding like a Nazi, Rand explains how democrats behave like Nazis today.;

 

[Quantum Windbag]

It is good to see that more rational, mature people are in agreement on the selection of the radical, ideologue Paul Ryan. Check piece below and links.

"Romney Chooses Randroid Paul Ryan as VP Candidate ... the horror, the horror. In some ways, this is even worse than McCain's choice of the narcissistic moron Sarah Palin in 2008. First, Ryan has a clear ideology, and it's a mixture of the vicious and the insane. Second, Ryan does not seem to be as inept and self-destructive as Palin, so he may really be the future even if Romney loses this year. In other words, the Republican Party is now officially the party committed to destroying Medicare and destroying Social Security. Unless they are crushed in the election, this battle is going to continue for a generation or more.

Consider, in perspective, what's happened: an ideology (partly inspired by Rand--remember dopey Alan Greenspan?) of deregulation and unbridled capitalism brought the world to the brink of economic collapse in 2008. Four years later, the Republican Party has now openly embraced a full-throated Randian ideology. This country has learned nothing. If Obama does not rise to this occasion, and launch a full-throttled attack on this ideology, he will go down in history as the most craven coward in American politics." Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Romney Chooses Randroid Paul Ryan as VP Candidate...


""From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” It remains true that Ayn Rand seems to revel in the death and destruction that follows by disregarding her philosophy: most famously in the ghoulish scene in Atlas Shrugged where Rand details the suffocation of the passengers on a train as it enters a tunnel. Rand explains how everyone on the train deserved to die because they held incorrect ideas: "It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.""

"Rand’s popularity tells us two things about the state of modern conservatism...First, it suggests that Rand’s atheism and permissive social views are no longer deal-breakers among conservative thought leaders....Beck and Limbaugh can use the parts of Rand they want to use and not engage the rest.” Tea Party Embraces Ayn Rand

Whittaker Chambers 1957 Review of Ayn Rand

Rule of thumb here, anyone that compares Paul Ryan to Ayn Rand is neither rational nor mature. Since I have already covered all the flaws in that comparison in this very thread before you even said anything I will simply reference my previous post.

http://www.usmessageboard.com/5817881-post91.html

 

[Old Rocks]

Geeze, I'm so GLAD I'm voting for......

Paul Ryan and not that Ayn Rand.

She sounds like a truly horrible person

She is Ryan's idol so sorry to say I think you are voting for her and her political views,

She's my idol too.

Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman | Michael Prescott

In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, "What is good for me is right," a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard," she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.)

At the time, she was planning a novel that was to be titled The Little Street, the projected hero of which was named Danny Renahan.According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)

"A wonderful, free, light consciousness" born of the utter absence of any understanding of "the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people." Obviously, Ayn Rand was most favorably impressed with Mr. Hickman. He was, at least at that stage of Rand's life, her kind of man.

So the question is, who exactly was he?

William Edward Hickman was one of the most famous men in America in 1928. But he came by his fame in a way that perhaps should have given pause to Ayn Rand before she decided that he was a "real man" worthy of enshrinement in her pantheon of fictional heroes.

You see, Hickman was a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer.

Other than that, he was probably a swell guy.

In December of 1927, Hickman, nineteen years old, showed up at a Los Angeles public school and managed to get custody of a twelve-year-old girl, Marian (sometimes Marion) Parker. He was able to convince Marian's teacher that the girl's father, a well-known banker, had been seriously injured in a car accident and that the girl had to go to the hospital immediately. The story was a lie. Hickman disappeared with Marian, and over the next few days Mr. and Mrs. Parker received a series of ransom notes. The notes were cruel and taunting and were sometimes signed "Death" or "Fate." The sum of $1,500 was demanded for the child's safe release. (Hickman needed this sum, he later claimed, because he wanted to go to Bible college!) The father raised the payment in gold certificates and delivered it to Hickman. As told by the article "Fate, Death and the Fox" in crimelibrary.com,

"At the rendezvous, Mr. Parker handed over the money to a young man who was waiting for him in a parked car. When Mr. Parker paid the ransom, he could see his daughter, Marion, sitting in the passenger seat next to the suspect. As soon as the money was exchanged, the suspect drove off with the victim still in the car. At the end of the street, Marion's corpse was dumped onto the pavement. She was dead. Her legs had been chopped off and her eyes had been wired open to appear as if she was still alive. Her internal organs had been cut out and pieces of her body were later found strewn all over the Los Angeles area."

 

[Intense]

It's already been posted. What took you so long. You need to practice your draw.

 

[Katzndogz]

As serial killer, Rodney Alcala once appeared on the Dating Game, we can be assured that the Dating Game supports serial killers.

 

[Misty]

Ayn Rand has nothing at all to offer. Her philosophy Objectivism is the dly that everyone must fend for themselves or pay for her medical treatments...for lung cancer...because she smoked.
When Ayn was found out,

As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than k the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so. Ayn Rand took government assistance while decrying others who did the same - Boing Boing

Aint it great when the hypocrites are found out?
( and yes, I have read The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and We, The Living. Ive read some of her non fiction as well as several books by her follower and one time lover, Nathaiel Branden.

Objectivism is a joke. )

"I found this odd since Rand had commented that people who are forced to fund government programs are NOT immoral for taking the benefits for which they paid. For instance, it is not wrong for people to attend government schools, which are funded with their tax monies, whether they like it or not. They have to start with a false premise: that Rand said receiving Social Security, that one is forced to pay for, was wrong. Without that false claim they have no charge of hypocrisy. They pretend she took a position she never took and then accuse her of violating the position she didn't take."

She paid in to the program because we are forced to pay into so she was not a hypocrite for using it at the end of her life. She'd paid into for a lifetime. She was forced to like we all are. She fought it tooth and nail but at her weakest moment it was her nurse who signed her up.

 

[Misty]

Link for my quote. Classically Liberal: Lying about Ayn Rand and Social Security

 

[jasonnfree]

No put she could have admitted thet such horrible socialist programs do help people. Sure she paid in, or her husband did. I wonder if she checked herself out of the hospital if and when the money spent on her was greater than the money she or her husband were forced to pay into?

Ayn Rand has nothing at all to offer. Her philosophy Objectivism is the dly that everyone must fend for themselves or pay for her medical treatments...for lung cancer...because she smoked.
When Ayn was found out,

As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than k the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so. Ayn Rand took government assistance while decrying others who did the same - Boing Boing

Aint it great when the hypocrites are found out?
( and yes, I have read The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and We, The Living. Ive read some of her non fiction as well as several books by her follower and one time lover, Nathaiel Branden.

Objectivism is a joke. )

"I found this odd since Rand had commented that people who are forced to fund government programs are NOT immoral for taking the benefits for which they paid. For instance, it is not wrong for people to attend government schools, which are funded with their tax monies, whether they like it or not. They have to start with a false premise: that Rand said receiving Social Security, that one is forced to pay for, was wrong. Without that false claim they have no charge of hypocrisy. They pretend she took a position she never took and then accuse her of violating the position she didn't take."

She paid in to the program because we are forced to pay into so she was not a hypocrite for using it at the end of her life. She'd paid into for a lifetime. She was forced to like we all are. She fought it tooth and nail but at her weakest moment it was her nurse who signed her up.

 

[jasonnfree]

you know, as a matter of libertarian principle?

 

[Peach]

Those too slow witted for Nabokov of course turn to easy reading!

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

"A wonderful, free, light consciousness" born of the utter absence of any understanding of "the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people." Obviously, Ayn Rand was most favorably impressed with Mr. Hickman. He was, at least at that stage of Rand's life, her kind of man.

Rand is merely Nietzsche warmed-over for Americans.

 

[ABikerSailor]

Quick question for all you Christian conservatives who think Ayn Rand's ideas are good...............

What do you think Jesus would have thought of her outlook?

 

[Vidi]

Libs should shut up about Ayn Rand or they run the risk of instigating curiosity so that more might read her books and change their minds about an over reaching government.

They keep mixing up Her with what she wrote.....You can tell none of them ever read what she wrote.

I read Ayn Rand. I got the books from the library. Like Paul Ryan, her philosophies made a big impression on me. That's how I ended up with a law degree instead of a welfare check.

Oh look a sandwich. Truth between two lies.

 

[Political Junky]

Quick question for all you Christian conservatives who think Ayn Rand's ideas are good...............

What do you think Jesus would have thought of her outlook?

Well, Paul Ryan turned on Ayn as soon as the Catholic Church went after him for holding her in higher esteen than Jesus.