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.”
Fearing political suicide, Republican leaders have tried to distance themselves from Ryan’s “roadmap” budget proposal, which calls for privatizing Social Security. But Ryan is upfront about it.
At a 2005 celebration of what would have been Rand’s 100th birthday, Ryan called for reforming the “collectivist system” of Social Security by changing it to individual savings accounts.
“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,” Ryan said at the 2005 event, according to a profile written last year in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
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.
In last year’s CPAC address, he claimed the White House had blamed the free market for the financial crisis, then used the crisis as an “excuse to impose a more intrusive state.”
And despite GOP attempts to frame these entitlement reforms as something other than privatization, Ryan has been clear on the point.
“Rather than depending on government for your retirement and health security, I propose to empower people to become much more self-dependent for such things in life,” he said in a speech to the Hudson Institute last June.
