Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The children of Ayn Rand are children.

I've said it before, but it needs repeating: adherents of Ayn Rand, almost without exception, are emotionally stunted children, walking around in the bodies of adults.
Our latest example? Paul Ryan.

Frank Bruni today in the NYTimes notes that when Paul was 16, his father died. Apparently, soon after this, Paul found Ayn Rand. Her writings appeal to both the emotionally stunted ('you can't tell me what to do, Mooooom') and the emotionally isolated. At 16, without his father, Paul Ryan was in both categories. And, by his adherence to her excuse for an economic theory, he continues to inhabit at least one. Which one is irrelevant.

The truth about this rugged, self-made individualist's self-made myth is that it's a lie from end to end. His family's business, since 1910, was building roads. That's government contracting. That's profiting from your tax dollars, local, state and federal. Enough profit so that at 16, Paul inherited at least $150K of the family trust, in 1986 dollars. Not exactly bereft of funds. Yet he chose to collect the monthly Social Security benefit minor children of dead parents receive. I know a bit about this, as my sister died and left two girls behind in high school. Depending on when Paul Ryan's dad died, he may have collected that monthly payment until the month after he turned twenty-one. That's five years of free money to someone who';d never paid into Social Security when those payments started.

I said depending on when his dad died, because the rule changed in 1986. My nieces only got to collect until they were eighteen, a result of Reagan's balancing his 600-ship Navy build-out on the backs of orphans, among others.

This is Randism, Ryan-style: come from a family built on tax dollars, never work three days in a row for any employer except governments or politicians, then claim to know something about working for a living, accusing others of being freeloaders.

This nation doesn't need business leaders or 'job creators' in our legislatures, and we don't need politicians who've never worked except to get elected.

We need employees, line workers, working moms, who worry about paying their only mortgage, feeding the kids, and trying to keep them from needing the emergency room.

Because they have a better idea of priorities, of why this nation was founded, and of how the game should be played, than almost all of the butt-trumpets trying to get elected or re-elected these days.

Especially Paul Ryan. A lost boy still playing at 'Man Of The House', crying himself to sleep every night, waiting for Daddy to come home.