A couple old articles on Paul Ryan, though very relevant now that he’s the beltway media’s “courageous” and very “serious” person who will save us from our burdensome social safety net. I’ll just stitch together a few excerpts:

TPM: Who Is John Galt? Maybe He’s Paul Ryan

Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) determination to privatize Social Security and dismantle Medicare — what he calls a “collectivist system” — comes, at least in part, from his longstanding devotion to the works of Ayn Rand.

Rand developed the objectivist philosophy, which values the self, capitalism and laissez-faire economics. Ryan, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, reportedly requires staffers and interns to read her opus, Atlas Shrugged, and gives out copies as gifts.

In his keynote address to CPAC last year, Ryan said Obama’s policies sound “like something right out of an Ayn Rand novel.”
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In interviews, he has said Republicans should frame the choice between “collectivism” and capitalism as a moral choice.

“We have an opportunity to make a choice clearly once and for all in the next two elections, and we owe it to the American people to give them a clear choice: Do you want a collectivist welfare state or do you want to get back to being a free market? We need to make a moral, not just practical or statistical, case,” he told Reason, a libertarian magazine, in December.

jsonline.com

“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,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”
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At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand’s writings when he told his audience that, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill  . . .  is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict - individualism versus collectivism.”

In that struggle, Ryan argued that shifting Social Security (which he called a “collectivist system”) toward personal investment accounts was not only good policy, but would change the political landscape, according to a recording of the event made by its host, The Atlas Society.

“If we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing Social Security, think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist. They will be an owner of society.  . . .  That’s that many more people in America who are not going to listen to the likes of Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, the collectivist, class-warfare-breathing demagogues,” said Ryan.

Looks like an Objectivist has been put in charge of the asylum… we’re screwed, aren’t we?