• • Paul Ryan’s cruelly radical vision 
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House Republicans seem to believe they can offer a budget closer to Ayn Rand’s worldview than Ronald Reagan’s without paying much of a price. Some Senate Republicans inclined toward a reasonable deal will feel pressure to move right, given where Ryan has defined the boundaries of the debate inside the GOP.      View blog reactions

• • How the right wing lost in 2012 
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Egoism  |Paul Ryan  |Syndicated  | If the Romney/Paul Ryan budget and tax ideas were so popular, why would the candidate and his sidekick, the one-time devotee of Ayn Rand, be investing so much energy in hiding the most important details of their plans? For that matter, why would Ryan feel obligated to forsake his love for Rand, the proud philosopher of “the virtue of selfishness” and the thinker he once said had inspired his public service? Romney knows that by substantial margins, the country favors raising taxes on the rich and opposes slashing many government programs, including Medicare and Social Security. Since Romney’s actual plan calls for cutting taxes on the rich, he has to disguise the fact.      View blog reactions

• Sherrod Brown’s lessons for Obama 
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Paul Ryan  | [Paul] Ryan, Brown said, has “dressed up trickle-down economics and wrapped it in an Ayn Rand novel.” The vice president, Brown added, should highlight the Republicans’ desire to privatize both Medicare and Social Security, reflected in Ryan’s own record and Republicans’ attempts to do so whenever they thought they had the votes. “It’s clear they want to go there,” Brown said.      View blog reactions

• • GOP leaders must free themselves from the Tea Party’s grip 
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Atheism  |The Fountainhead  |Individualism  | The tea party lives in an intellectual bubble where the answers to every problem lie in books by F.A. Hayek, Glenn Beck or Ayn Rand. Rand’s anti-government writings, regarded by her followers as modern-day scripture — Rand, an atheist, would have bridled at that comparison — are particularly instructive. When the hero of Rand’s breakthrough novel “The Fountainhead” doesn’t get what he wants, he blows up a building. Rand’s followers see that as gallant. So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that blowing up our government doesn’t seem to be a big deal to some of the new radical individualists in our House of Representatives.      View blog reactions