• • The Gift that Just Keeps On Giving 
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Egoism  |Paul Ryan  | I want to say 2 things about the whole Social Darwinist, “makers and takers”, Ayn Rand-style selfishness is a virtue/generosity weakens society, 47% of you (and especially you blacks and Hispanics and young women who want your contraceptives) are dependent leeches philosophy. The first is that it is clear that the Republicans really believe it. Whenever they don’t think anyone except their wealthy donors are paying attention, they lay it all out there, are very open about it. This is their core philosophy, their core values that we’re talking about here.      View blog reactions

• • Mike Lux: Kevin's Gift 
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Paul Ryan  |Inaccurate  | [My brother] Kevin is one of those people who followers of Ayn Rand’s philosophy would call a leech on society -- Rand believed that people with disabilities were leeches and parasites on society, and that the “parasites should perish.” Kevin’s birth father broke a chair over his head and gave him brain damage, making him developmentally disabled and making it hard for him to speak clearly. [....] A government that would cut support to middle-class families trying to support their disabled children so the wealthy can get more tax breaks -- a government that actually decides to help the wealthy and powerful more than the poor and disabled -- would be a government with no decency. That is what Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the Republicans are proposing for us. Their hero Ayn Rand would be proud.      View blog reactions

• • • Ayn Rand or Jesus Christ? Conservatives Can’t Have It Both Ways 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  | Last week Paul Ryan said that his fondness for the philosophy of Ayn Rand is an “urban legend.” You have to give these wild and crazy Republicans credit for at least one thing: they have cojones the size of the elephants which are the mascots for the party. The urban myth quote came after a career of Ayn Rand idolatry special even for right-wing Republicans: giving the book to his interns, speaking at Ayn Rand tributes, doing videos about her, saying her philosophy inspired him to get involved in politics. This was no youthful fling, but a lifelong love affair -- until last week , apparently.      View blog reactions

• • • Shining City on a Hill 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  | My absolute favorite story of the week is Paul Ryan saying that his fondness for the philosophy of Ayn Rand is an “urban legend.” You have to give these wild and crazy Republicans credit for at least one thing: they have cojones the size of the elephants which are the mascots for the party. The urban myth quote came after a career of Ayn Rand idolatry special even for right-wing Republicans: giving the book to his interns, speaking at Ayn Rand tributes, doing videos about her, saying her philosophy inspired him to get involved in politics. This was no youthful fling, but a lifelong love affair -- until a couple of days ago, apparently.      View blog reactions

• Ryan-Romney Budget Killing Republicans 
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When Ayn Rand, Gordon Gekko, and Rush Limbaugh are your side’s philosophers, it makes it very easy to tell a morality tale and have it hit home. When the other side wants to cut health care for Grandma, along with school lunches, Head Start and classroom teachers for your kids, in order to give even more tax cuts for millionaires, it is pretty easy to make the case that the other side is morally bankrupt. You don’t have to go to your Bible, as I sometimes like to do, for quotes about right and wrong to know how deeply wrong the Ryan budget is.      View blog reactions

• • Most Conservative Congress in How Long? 
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Egoism  | The Robber Barons were hiring the Pinkertons to (literally) murder union leaders, and were (literally) buying off elected officials to get whatever they wanted out of the government: money for bribery was openly allocated in yearly corporate budgets. These huge corporate trusts were working hand in hand with their worshipful friends in the Social Darwinist world, the 1800s version of Ayn Rand, who taught that if you were rich, it was because that was the way nature meant things to be -- and if you were poor, you deserved to be.      View blog reactions

• Rick Warren's Dependency 
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Whether poor people are helped by government or individual charity, wouldn’t it be promoting dependency all the same according to conservatives? (Right-wing hero Ayn Rand sure thought so.)      View blog reactions

• • Darwin: Scientist but Not Economist 
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On the one hand, [voters] need to understand just what the Republicans are offering: a Social Darwinist, Ayn Randish future where all the benefits go to the wealthiest, who got that way because they are the "fittest" -- where only the wealthy "job producers" get any benefits at all from government. On the other, they need to see Democratic candidates from the presidential level on down who they believe will fight without pause or fear for the middle class and those trying to climb the ladder up into it.      View blog reactions

• • Reluctant Warriors 
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Egoism  | The entire country will be drawn into this most fundamental of American debates: will America’s future be a social Darwinian, Ayn Rand-like country where selfishness and greed are the virtues worshipped above all others, where the wealthy reap ever more rewards no matter what they did to get their wealth, where the powerful have no holds on their power and the weak are left behind to fend for themselves? Or are we a country where we value each other and believe in our nation as a sacred community, where political and economic power is dispersed widely rather than held by just a few, where the middle class is prosperous and growing again, and where “the least of these” is given a hand up and their children are given a chance at a decent life?      View blog reactions

• The Year of the Lord’s Favor 
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Capitalism  | Backed by the 1%, the Wall Street elite and the captains of industry who destroyed the economy but are deeply hurt and offended when anyone tries to hold them accountable for it, these Republicans are hell-bent are creating an economy based on the ideas of Ayn Rand and Gordon Gekko, where greed is good, generosity and kindness are weaknesses, and we are taught that it is everyone for themselves and devil take the hindmost.      View blog reactions

• • Preaching the Bible with Todd Akin 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  | Conservatives can rant and rave all they want about Godless liberalism, but all that ranting is just a cover for advocating the wealthiest and most powerful people in America. They believe far more passionately in Ayn Rand and her belief that selfishness is a virtue than they do in the Bible. They can talk all they want about how great free enterprise is, but their philosophy at the end of the day boils down almost entirely to helping millionaires and billionaires while hurting the middle class and poor. And that is the exact opposite of what Jesus taught.      View blog reactions

• • What Does America Stand For? 
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Egoism  |Paul Ryan  |Inaccurate  | Are we a nation built on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, which celebrates selfishness and wealth above all other things, and mocks people like my [developmentally and physically disabled] brother Kevin as defective parasites? Or do we follow the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr. who had a dream, “deeply rooted in the American Dream,” that we would be an American family sitting down at the table of brotherhood where we were all judged on the content of our character? By that test, my brother Kevin would far outshine people like Paul Ryan.      View blog reactions

• • • Ayn Rand and the Conservative Contradiction 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | Given Rand’s endorsement of terrorism, her strong admiration for a rapist and serial killer, her intense racism and vile hatred of people with disabilities, and her complete dismissal of traditional Christian values of altruism and generosity, I had a hard time believing that so many leading Republicans would be so openly embracing of her.      View blog reactions

• • Babies and Glenn Beck 
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Egoism  |Inaccurate  | Glenn Beck [...] enthusiastically told an audience, to cheers and laughter, that in nature, “the lions eat the weak.” This is the same Glenn Beck who clearly takes much of his philosophical underpinnings from Ayn Rand, who described compassion and charity as moral weaknesses which were leeches on society, and celebrated the “virtue of selfishness.”      View blog reactions

• The Chamber speech: The debates about regulation and the social contract 
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Egoism  | When I first heard that Obama would be speaking to the Chamber [of Commerce], as soon as I stopped cursing, my first thought was this: I hope he makes the case for the social contract, or as he called it, compact. That old but still central idea, totally rejected by the kind of selfishness-is-a-virtue, Ayn Rand conservatives who dominate in too many corporate board rooms and the modern Republican Party, is that there is contract between our country’s citizens, government, and private sector, that much is given to each of us but much is required in return.      View blog reactions

• • Robbing you with a fountain pen 
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Rand Paul  |Inaccurate  | Ayn Rand, the Social Darwinists of the 1880s, the big Wall Street banks, libertarian candidates like Rand Paul and these thugs who work on their campaigns all make the same arguments: power is morality, greed is good, compassion is weakness, buyer beware.      View blog reactions

• Populist surge or muddled message overwhelmed by money? 
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Capitalism  | [Tim] Geithner [...] defends the banks, not only giving them a free pass on the fraud going on the foreclosure market, but actually saying they should get credit for temporarily suspending the foreclosure process “so they can make sure that they’re not causing any injustice to the borrowers”. Does anyone besides Geithner and the occasional Ayn Rand acolyte believe that these bankers are such moral, salt of the earth types that they care about the injustice being done to mortgage holders?      View blog reactions

• • Sex and social justice 
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At least conservatives like Ayn Rand were honest in their disdain for religious pieties about compassion and helping the weak. Those conservatives who are trying so hard to wrap themselves in the Bible ought to try actually reading one someday.      View blog reactions

• • Are compassion and community evil? 
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Egoism  |Inaccurate  | [T]he compassion-equals-evil argument didn’t really get laid out in detail until Ayn Rand’s writings, where she actually did argue that people with compassion and concern for others were leeches who drained society of its competitive life blood. Just as Ayn Rand took the Social Darwinist argument and made it more virulent, the conservative author Jonah Goldberg brought a new, more extreme twist to the argument, literally saying that progressives like FDR were ideological soul mates of Hitler and Mussolini’s brand of fascism.      View blog reactions

• The choices we have to make 
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Capitalism  | Fabulous Fab is the superman of [the Republicans’] Ayn Rand fantasy lives.      View blog reactions