The Paul Ryan paradox: Rand and Hayek?

[Dusty Bake Activate]

Opinion: The Paul Ryan paradox: Ayn Rand & Friedrich Hayek? - Nicholas Wapshott - POLITICO.com

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has been done a great disservice.

He is painted as a crazy ideologue, who channels dangerous ideas of foreign thinkers like the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and the anti-communist, Russian cultist Ayn Rand to revolutionize the way the United States is run. He is labeled a conservative and a libertarian firebrand, ready to launch an ideological barrage against Romney administration foot-draggers. Including the man in the Oval Office.

Leading conservatives are impressed by Ryan’s erudition. The Weekly Standard dubbed him “the Republican Party’s intellectual leader.” Ryan was Rupert Murdoch’s first choice for veep and editors at his Wall Street Journal and Fox News duly lobbied for Ryan’s appointment. Mitt Romney, threatened by the wrath of Murdoch’s media empire, duly made brain-box Ryan his sidekick.

With Ryan’s devotion to the ideas of Hayek and Rand on full display, the Republican rank and file were relieved they at last had a true believer to follow. In the words of conservatism’s excitable high priest, Rush Limbaugh, “We now have somebody on the ticket who’s us.”

Democrats were appalled. Conceding that the appointment had “thrilled the base of the Republican Party,” David Axelrod, the strategist who steered Obama into the White House in 2008, branded Ryan “a certifiable right-wing ideologue.” President Barack Obama confirmed that Ryan was the “ideological leader” of Republicans in Congress. But what sort of ideology are we talking about?

When it comes to Ryan’s ambitious intellectual quest, he spreads his net far beyond Hayek and Rand. In the introduction to his 2010 budget-slashing “Roadmap” the congressman sought to display intellectual depth by citing a rarified conservative cocktail — including the Founding Fathers, Émile Durkheim, Niall Ferguson, John Locke, Charles Murray, Adam Smith, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Georges-Eugène Sorel, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Max Weber, as well as Hayek and Milton Friedman. Ryan’s scatter-shot approach to conservative thought, however, tells us little about what he really thinks.

Consider, to bring new staffers up to speed, Ryan gives them copies of Hayek’s classic “Road to Serfdom” and Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” — books he says inspires his political philosophy.

But Hayek and Rand were violently opposed to each other’s ideas. It is virtually impossible to hold them in the same brain. When the termagant Rand met Hayek, she screamed across the room, “Compromiser!” and reviled him as an “abysmal fool,” an “ass” and a “totally, complete, vicious b*stard.”

Rand devised a whole vision of a free-market America that cannot be served à la carte. This included her revulsion to all religion and her belief that everyone was entitled to do with their bodies as they please — including women’s right to have an abortion without needing to give a reason. Ryan, a Roman Catholic who supports the Republican plan to outlaw by constitutional amendment all abortion, including after rape, incest or when a woman’s life is in danger, is not a good Randian. Though he plainly likes the Republican rank and file to think he is.

Hayek is even more problematic for Ryan. The House Budget Committee chairman’s citing of “The Road to Serfdom” is intended to show he is against big government and that he supports Hayek’s most popular contention — that the larger the state becomes the more it may trammel individual rights.

But Hayek wrote far more than that. In that same book, he makes an impassioned plea for civilized governments to provide homes for everyone; a generous safety net for the disadvantaged, and universal health care. Ryan’s plans to “reform” Medicare and Social Security and to “reform” the welfare system are hardly Hayekian by any stretch.

Hayek’s Austrian economics is also more complex than Ryan would have the conservative base believe. A strong supporter of free-market solutions, Hayek believed governments should be strong enough to impose strict regulations to ensure the market operated freely and fairly. He wanted to abolish all national boundaries, allowing labor to move freely between states, which would mean doing away with the boundary wall between Texas and Mexico. He did not understand the notion of an illegal immigrant. He was against tax cuts, unless the government was in surplus, and thought John Maynard Keynes’s idea of cutting taxes at a time of high government borrowing was irresponsible and immoral.

You can’t be both a Hayekian and a Friedmanite at the same time. “Milton’s monetarism and Keynesianism,” Hayek declared, “have more in common with each other than I have with either.” When it came to the TARP, President George W. Bush’s rescue of failing banks and financial institutions, and Obama’s close to $800 billion stimulus, Ryan voted for government action — as Keynes and Friedman would have recommended. He even lobbied for stimulus money to be showered in his home state. Hayek would have been appalled.

Those who hope Ryan is a true conservative and libertarian ideologue – though conservatism and libertarianism are actually creeds at loggerheads with each other, as the rift in the Republic Party attests – should be careful. It’s all very well bandying around the name of conservative and libertarian household gods. But quite a different thing to read them, understand them and live by them.

Don’t expect much clarification before November about which intellectual star Ryan thinks he has hitched himself to. And after November — it will be too late.

 

[The Real]

These people are rarely intellectuals. That Irish President Higgins who was posted up in that video where he destroyed the tea partier was a real intellectual. He was an actual political science/political philosophy professor for many years and read and understood the material he claimed to follow. Imagine electing someone like that here... Most of these people just throw out a few names for credibility, but don't actually follow anyone's ideas because they don't actually read or understand them.

 

[ogc163]

I expected Wapshott to continue with the mischaracterizations prevalent in his book, but aside from the debatable assertion that Friedman would have supported TARP he gets it right in this article.

 

[Broke Wave]

Even though I disagree with Friedman and Hayek, they are both serious economists who contributed a lot to the non-partisan study of economics in their respective specializations.

Ayn Rand has contributed nothing academically, and is the most juvenile author I have ever had the misfortune of encountering. To take the position that altruism is evil simply based on her own obviously racially driven ideology is absurd.

 

[VerbalIntercourse]

I never thought I would see Hayek, a nobel laureate economist, seen as a dangerous thinker.

 

[The Real]

I never thought I would see Hayek, a nobel laureate economist, seen as a dangerous thinker.

He isn't. Even I read him in school. It's that hack Ayn Rand who should be seen as dangerous, because of her shockingly stupid ideas.

 

[VerbalIntercourse]

He isn't. Even I read him in school. It's that hack Ayn Rand who should be seen as dangerous, because of her shockingly stupid ideas.

fukk off. Ayn Rand is no more dangerous than that Communist heckler in your avatar.

Ayn Rand believed that judgement and should be guided by logic and reason. That's only a threat to philosophies driven by feelings and emotions.

 

[The Real]

fukk off. Ayn Rand is no more dangerous than that Communist heckler in your avatar.

Ayn Rand believed that judgement and should be guided by logic and reason. That's only a threat to philosophies driven by feelings and emotions.

No, she didn't. There is a large absence of logic and reason in her own thinking. She is poorly regarded by prominent philosophers, economists, and political theorists of all ideological backgrounds, and doesn't belong in the same discussion as serious thinkers like Hayek.

 

[Julius Skrrvin]

She used her medicare too, the c*nt.

 

[Dusty Bake Activate]

fukk off. Ayn Rand is no more dangerous than that Communist heckler in your avatar.

Ayn Rand believed that judgement and should be guided by logic and reason. That's only a threat to philosophies driven by feelings and emotions.

lol@the whiniest, most emotional bytch that's ever posted on the internet championing emotionless logic and reason.

 

[Dusty Bake Activate]

She used her medicare too, the c*nt.

And tried to hide it in secret. Dumb bytch smoked smoked cigarettes all her life then got lung cancer and threw her entire philosophy in the bushes. fukk her. Disgusting human being.