Ayn Rand followers applaud Paul Ryan
The head of the Atlas Society, an organization devoted to philosopher Ayn Rand’s principles of Objectivism, praised Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan on Saturday as “great news” and a “huge step forward for the liberty movement.”
“I think the announcement is great news,” Aaron Day, the CEO of the Atlas Society, told POLITICO. “[T]he influence of Rand on Ryan as it relates to the role and nature of government is a huge step forward for the liberty movement.”
Day’s comments come after Ryan distanced himself from Rand’s teachings earlier this year.
“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan told the National Review in April. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas…Don’t give me Ayn Rand.”
But Ryan’s disavowal’s come after years of promoting Rand’s books and endorsing her in 2009 as doing “the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79612.html#ixzz23KgT1q8H
Paul Ryan loved Ayn Rand, before he said he didn't
Back in 2005, an up-and-coming lawmaker named Paul Ryan credited the polemical novelist and libertarian Ayn Rand as a central inspiration for his entry into public life. Ryan toiled in those days in relative obscurity, a well-respected but low-profile member of the House of Representatives.
By the spring of 2012, the boyish congressman had become a Republican star, widely named as a possible vice presidential pick. He also had become considerably less comfortable being linked to the controversial Rand, an atheist with a tartly Darwinian world view.
As Ryan and the Republicans look to define the new vice presidential choice’s brand, part of the commentary will be about just how Randian (read: unsympathetic to the weak) the candidate really is.
Ayn (rhymes with “fine”) Rand wrote the bestselling “Atlas Shrugged.” She also encouraged the world’s “makers” to pursue “rational self interest” as “the highest moral purpose of life,” while giving little care to the nefarious “takers.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-vp-paul-ryan-ayn-rand-20120811,0,1175099.story
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