Ryan and Rand

hernan · August 21, 2012

Ryan's "introduction to the American people . . . will involve explaining who Ayn Rand is," wrote Newsweek's

Michael Tomasky, who called the Ryan pick "stunning" and "terrible." New York magazine's John Heilemann reported that he had spoken with Obama aide David Axelrod the day before the announcement, and "I couldn't help but detect a gleeful flicker in his eyes when we talked about the fervor on the right for the congressman from Wisconsin." The New Republic's Noam Scheiber theorized that Romney had resigned himself to losing the election and chosen Ryan merely "to shift blame for the loss onto the party's conservative wing."

Scheiber's hypothesis would be strange under any circumstances but is utterly bizarre given the closeness of this year's polls. Still, it's understandable that those who buy into the "radical libertarian" caricature would see the Ryan selection as an opportunity. As The New Yorker's

Ryan Lizza noted in a profile published two weeks before the Romney announcement, Ryan "claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand":

After reading "Atlas Shrugged," he told me, "I said, 'Wow, I've got to check out this economics thing.' What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government." He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

In a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. "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," he told the group. "The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism."

Ryan's acknowledgment of intellectual debt to Rand would seem to make him an easy target for the "radical libertarian" caricature. Rand's philosophy, known as Objectivism, fits the description, although

she herself scorned "the 'libertarian' hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism."

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