• With Me in Paradise 
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Paul Ryan  | In venues like the New York Times and the Huffington Post, as well as more traditional and conservative web sites, Catholic thinkers have weighed the proper approach to poverty, abortion, and marriage, pushing into matters—Is Paul Ryan a Randian? What is “intrinsic evil”?—normally found in footnotes.  

• • • Catholic Left’s Unfair Attack on Paul Ryan 
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Atheism  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  | Despite Ryan’s own very public statements of his points of agreement and significant disagreement with the thought of Ayn Rand, and despite the commendations he has received from the bishops who know him and his work best—Bishop Joseph Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York (formerly of Milwaukee)—Ryan is presented [in On All of Our Shoulders] as an unreconstructed Randian radical individualist and, as such, a clear opponent of Catholic social teaching.  

• • • Ryan Outrage Syndrome 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  | A recent issue of the New Republic features an extended tirade of sorts in which Leon Wieseltier sets out to show that the Paul Ryan “likes his capitalism cruel.” Wieseltier’s main rhetorical strategy involves turning Ryan into Ayn Rand with a congressional committee appointment. He reminds us that Ryan’s father’s death was a life-defining moment, one that forced him to try to figure out the meaning of life. In this period of searching he read Ayn Rand and developed his lifelong enthusiasm for her work. Out of this fact Wieseltier makes his case.  

• Paul Ryan and the Angry Catholic Left 
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Capitalism  |Paul Ryan  | Ryan was scheduled to talk at Georgetown, and the ever-reliable Fr. Thomas J. Reese, S.J., and others have organized a letter of protest. “Our problem with Representative Ryan,” Reese told reporters, “is that he claims his budget is based on Catholic social teaching. This is nonsense.” I’m afraid that “nonsense” applies more to the letter Reese helped write than the budget Ryan proposed. It accuses Ryan of “continuing misuse of Catholic teaching,” and snidely dismisses his budget proposal as reflecting “the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” [....] This is not a letter of protest but instead one of reprimand.  

• The End of Social Democracy 
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Capitalism  | After the traumas of the Great Depression and World War II, the great imperative in the West was stability. This was perhaps clearest in Italy and Germany, the former Axis countries where, with strong encouragement from the victorious Americans, leaders emerged who were committed to brokering a new social contract that combined the openness of free market capitalism with the encompassing and egalitarian concern for social welfare that made socialism attractive to many. Fans of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek will certainly decry this system, but I find myself marveling at its achievements.  

• The Dangerous Mind of Peter Singer 
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Despite the fact that [Peter] Singer champions an incoherent and inconsistent philosophy—he’s the Ivy League equivalent of Ayn Rand—he’s been eerily influential.  

• • • The Fountainhead of Satanism 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  | Many conservatives admire Rand because she was anti-collectivist. But that is like admiring Stalin because he opposed Nazism. Stalin was against the Nazis because he wanted to make the world safe for Communism. Likewise, Rand stands against collectivism because she wants the freedom to abolish Judeo-Christian morality. Conservative Christians who embrace her as the “enemy-of-my-enemy” seem to forget that she considered us the enemy.