Paul "Ahmadinejad" Ryan and Ayn Rand

Like many teenagers in my times, I read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.  I even read her play, The Night of January 16th.  All these even as I read Russian literature, Dickens, and plain old commie stuff, all of which would have confused the hell out of a profile-creating algorithm :)

Eventually, I grew up. I ditched the commie ideas. I ditched Ayn Rand's too.  Now, it simply fascinates me when old men continue to call themselves socialists and communists, or when they proudly talk about their Randian fixations.

Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand stories are, therefore, wonderful material, which Michael Kinsley, true to his form, exploits well:

Paul Ryan laughed. He stood naked on top of the vice president's desk in the Senate chamber, scanning the crowd of sniveling politicians below him.
He flexed his muscles, the result of hours spent in the House gymnasium. Look at these pathetic specimens, he thought. Not one of them could do a one-armed push-up if his life depended on it. Not one was worthy of so much as cosponsoring one of Ryan's bills. Every single one of them had been elected by appealing to the average citizen in his (or her — Ryan snorted at the thought) district. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that of all the men and women in this room, only he, Paul Ryan, had been selected for his current office by the president himself.

Awesome!

Speaking of Ayn Rand, how was her Atlas Shrugged received by critics when it was published?  The LA Times offers a few excerpts, out of which I liked this the following two the best:

Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times:
It is probably the worst piece of large fiction written since Miss Rand's equally weighty "The Fountainhead." Miss Rand writes in the breathless hyperbole of soap opera. Her characters are of billboard size; her situations incredible and illogical; her story is feverishly imaginative. It would be hard to find such a display of grotesque eccentricity outside an asylum.

and this one:

Whittaker Chambers, National Review
"Atlas Shrugged" can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned "higher morality," which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world…. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.

 Now, those were book reviewers, unlike the contemporary state of reviewing!

Not to be outdone by America's Finest News Source, the original real-news publication that featured spy-vs-spy reports that Democrats are spreading all kinds of misinformation about Paul Ryan:

Paul Ryan's supply-side economics is a high stakes gamble

Simon Says.

Simon Johnson, that is:

Ryan and members of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party undoubtedly want to cut the size of the federal government, and they have articulated plans to do this over several decades. But, in the near term, what they promise is primarily tax cuts: their entire practical program is front-loaded in that direction. The calculation is that this will prove politically popular (probably true) while making it easier to implement spending cuts down the road (less obvious). The vulnerability caused by higher public debt over the next few decades is simply ignored.

For example, Ryan supported George W. Bush’s spending spree. He also supports maintaining defense spending at or near its current level – resisting the cuts that were put in place under the Budget Control Act of 2011.

The assumption here – unstated and highly questionable – is that the US will be able to sell an unlimited amount of government debt at low interest rates for the foreseeable future. There is no other country in the world where fiscal conservatives would want to be associated with such a high-stakes gamble.

Or, if you prefer a picture instead of Johnson's thousand words:

Quote of the day: Krugman on the Ryan plan for Medicare

Here’s an analogy: think of Medicare as a footbridge that is deteriorating and will eventually become unsafe. You could propose structural repairs to fix its faults; Ryan doesn’t do that. Instead, he proposes knocking the bridge down and replacing it with trampolines, in the hope that pedestrians can bounce across the stream. And the Post declares that he deserves credit for pointing out that the bridge is falling down, and proposing a solution. Um, we knew that the bridge was in bad shape — and his solution is a fraud.

Ah, the imagery of 80-year olds jumping on trampolines is priceless; can I use Ryan coupons to pay for that imagery?

Krugman's bottom line?

Republicans are proposing to destroy Medicare; saying that clearly isn’t scare tactics, it’s simply pointing out the truth.