The Echoes of Ayn Rand in Paul Ryan's Budget Plan

[marmar]

from the Atlantic:




The Echoes of Ayn Rand in Paul Ryan's Budget Plan

By Garance Franke-Ruta
Apr 11 2011, 9:13 AM ET


Jonathan Chait examines the intellectual underpinnings of the movement to slash budgets -- and especially programs that serve the poor, elderly and weak -- in a Newsweek piece, and argues that this is no accident:

...the furious Tea Party rebels and Ryan the earnest budget geek ... both spring from the same source. And it is to that source that you must look if you want to understand what Ryan is really after, and what makes these activists so angry.

The Tea Party began early in 2009 after an improvised rant by Rick Santelli, a CNBC commentator who called for an uprising to protest the Obama administration's subsidizing the "losers' mortgages." Video of his diatribe rocketed around the country, and protesters quickly adopted both his call for a tea party and his general abhorrence of government that took from the virtuous and the successful and gave to the poor, the uninsured, the bankrupt--in short, the losers. It sounded harsh, Santelli quickly conceded, but "at the end of the day I'm an Ayn Rander."

Ayn Rand, of course, was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard--a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived. The enduring heart of Rand's totalistic philosophy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites..... ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/the-echoes-of-ayn-rand-in-paul-ryans-budget-plan/237082/

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/the-echoes-of-ayn-rand-in-paul-ryans-budget-plan/237082/