Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged - Paul Ryan Exposed

April 22, 2011 - PRLog -- In a recent Newsweek article I read that Ayn 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."

Conservatives asserted that the events of the Obama administration eerily paralleled the plot of Ann Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, in which a liberal government precipitates economic collapse (but in reality it was during a conservative government that our financial collapse happened)

And this is how we get the Tea Party darling Paul Ryan. “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.”

Viewed as an effort to reduce the debt, Ryan’s plan makes little sense. Many of its proposals either have nothing to do with reducing deficits (repealing the financial-reform bill loathed by Wall Street) or actually increase deficits (making the Bush tax cuts permanent). Ryan’s plan does do two things in immediate and specific ways: hurt the poor and help the rich. Rolling Stone magazine makes my point very well.

The class tinge of Ryan’s Path to Prosperity is striking. The poorest Americans would suffer immediate, explicit budget cuts. Middle-class Americans would face distant, uncertain reductions in benefits. And the richest Americans would enjoy an immediate windfall.

Paul Ryan attended college on his father's death benefits from Social Security. Although his father had been a lawyer, Ryan says that to make ends meet, his mother "returned to school to study interior design". But before being a government employee, Paul Ryan worked for the family business, Ryan Incorporated Central, a construction firm that was founded by Ryan's great-grandfather in 1884. (So why did his mother have to go to school to "make ends meet", and did she actually get a job afterward just to feed and cloth poor Paul, even though his family already had the financial means?

Unlike Paul Ryan, most people need Social Security benefits for such mundane things as food, rent, and heat. But unlike Paul Ryan, they can't save this money for such things as vacations or new cars...or as in Ryan's case, a college education. So I believe him when he says, "I know how these social programs work."

He has received his congressional salary and federal healthcare from taxpayers since 1999. Over his last 12 years in congress he has received about $2 million in government salary alone. In a magazine interview he explains: “If we don’t turn this thing around really fast, we’re going to be a big welfare state." (Note that he never mentions anything about the "corporate welfare" that taxpayers pay in government subsidies to large businesses - like his own family-run construction business perhaps? But it's OK to use my money that I paid in to the system for the last 40 years to fund his college education - - - but then later when I lose my job and healthcare insurance, he wants to deny me these benefits that I busted my ass for over the last 40 years. Paul Ryan is just another typical Washington hypocrite.

In his article Two Cheers for the Welfare State, once a Reaganite (like myself), David Frum tells us how the financial collapse of 2008 drove him further to the left. "GK Chesterton once wrote that we should never tear down a fence until we knew why it had been built. In the calamity after 2008, we rediscovered why the fences of the old social insurance state had been built. I strongly suspect that today’s Ayn Rand moment will end in frustration or worse for Republicans."

Full Story: Paul Ryan's Holy Bible

www.bud-meyers.blogspot.com/2011/04/paul-ryans-holy-bible.html

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The Tier Five Times reports on the latest unemployment news such as the jobless numbers and unemployment benefits for "99ers" - those who have exhausted all unemployment insurance benefits.