Paul Ryan: Randian or Neocon?

By On August 24, 2012 · 20 Comments · In Current Events

I comment on the Oxford University Press blog here.

Excerpt:

Are we just one heart attack or gunshot away from an Ayn Rand presidency? No. As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. Paul Ryan’s voting record speaks loudly. He is no Randian libertarian. Rather, he is just another run-of-the-mill big government neoconservative. Ryan’s rise isn’t the ascent of Ayn Rand, but the return of George W. Bush.

 

Tagged with: •
 
  • ThaomasH

    Rand DOES seem to have Randian ideas about changing from fiat money to a commodity based money.

    • martinbrock

      Fiat money is a medium of exchange declared an exclusive legal tender for payment of taxes and other statutory rents and spent into circulation by a state that also buys and sells entitlement to the tax revenue. In other words, it is money commanded to circulate by a state as an instrument of state policy.

      A commodity based monetary system, like a gold standard, can be and often has been fiat money. Favoring a commodity based money is not equivalent to opposing fiat money.

      If Ryan opposes fiat money, he favors 1) eliminating the central bank, 2) eliminating any legal tender laws requiring anyone to accept any specified currency except as specified by contract, 3) requiring the state to accept any currency that a citizen freely accepts in payment of taxes or other obligations imposed by the state, 4) requiring the state to purchase only with currencies that sellers freely accept and 5) ceasing all sales of entitlement to tax revenue (sovereign debts) in any currency.

      I suppose Ryan doesn’t favor a single one of these reforms, much less all of them.

      • ThaomasH

        I’ll stand corrected on my shorthand, which I think is common among economists, of contrasting a commodity based money whose value is determined by prices of the commodity(s) used to base it and one whose value is deteined by monetary authorities. I think the belief that monetay authorities will systematicly do a worse job of mananging the money supply than would result from a commodity money system is a (not exclusively) Randian idea.

        • martinbrock

          A commodity based monetary system also influences the value of the commodity, especially when the commodity is durable, scarce and has an inelastic supply while also being the exclusive legal tender for all sorts of debts (including taxes) that people commonly must pay.

          Simply requiring the banking system to exchange circulating dollars for gold, while converting existing sovereign debts and other debts to obligations to pay in gold, at the current price of gold would not be an improvement over the current monetary system. It would be worse than what we have now.

          Unfortunately, this sort of transition is what many proponents of a gold standard advocate, and it’s the only move toward a gold standard, or any other sort of “free” banking system, we’ll ever get out of the state through an established political party.

          http://www.freebanking.org/2011/12/22/making-the-transition-to-a-new-gold-standard/

          Currency competition and genuinely free banking is another story altogether, and it’s a story rarely told. Practically all of the talk of a gold standard among nominal “libertarians” only advocates the statism of another era.

          The conventional gold standard story is much like the talk of “Social Security privatization” that typically ends with proposals for “private investment accounts” packed with sovereign debt guaranteed (by taxpayers of course) to pay an interest rate exceeding a statutory rate of inflation.

          Needless to say, such “private accounts” are incredibly Orwellian, and the whole idea of reforming Social Security this way completely ignores the actual, private tradition that Social Security replaced, the support of aging parents by their children.

  • Sean II

    In the past few years, I’ve come to find it very strange when people speak of things a politician “believes”, “favors”, or “opposes”, etc. Those concepts apply well enough to protest candidates like Gary Johnson or Ralph Nader, but when you’re talking about someone who’s safe enough to contend for national office, they cease to apply, and it becomes a bad intellectual habit to speak in such terms.

    Anyone who gets as deep into the game as Paul Ryan, or Mitt Romney, or Barack Obama, is there precisely because he believes nothing. The selection process in politics is nearly perfect in weeding out anyone who would ever choose an idea over a donor’s check or sacrifice a block of votes to spare some personal conviction.

    One would never say that McDonald’s “believes in” sodium-enriched fried potato products. That’s just something they sell because people are buying. Nor do they “oppose” pea pods and celery snacks. That’s just something they don’t sell because no one is buying.
    Ryan is no different: he has a target market, he has a strategy to reach it. At one point, that strategy included pretending to be a fan of Ayn Rand. Today, the plan is to carefully distance himself from that image as required by the demands of a national campaign. In fact, his ideal strategy is to send a precisely metered mix of confusing messages so that libertarians and evangelicals both tend to mistake him for one of their own.
    Still – and this is the crucial point – it is very interesting that the electoral market now includes a libertarianoid faction big enough to command this kind of attention. Think about it: Ryan could solve his Rand problem with just one press release, by using the word “cult” and denouncing her personally, while clearly repudiating individualism as a basic idea.
    What’s fascinating is that he doesn’t dare. That says nothing about him, but it says something very intriguing about the possible future of the American electorate.

  • good_in_theory

    Recently I’ve come to find a certain black humor in spinning out the logical consequences of Ryan’s views with respect to abortion.

    Throw together…
    Life begins at conception
    No exception for rape or the health of the mother
    Abortion as 1st degree murder
    Support for the death penalty in the case of murders of minors

    And you get…

    For Paul Ryan, ideal policy consists in police physically forcing pregnant rape victims to carry their children to term, even if it kills the woman. Further, he would charge her and her doctor with 1st degree murder subject to the penalty of death if they succeeded in skirting the prohibition.

    Very pro-liberty, this one..

    • Sean II

      Of course, in that typically creepy and calculating way, Ryan knows he will never have to face the logic of those positions.

      Anti-abortionists have become the blacks of the Republican spectrum. They’re a reliable voting block with nowhere else to go, easily bought by cheap rhetoric in the primary season, then slowly hidden away so their profile tapers down to the vanishing point in early November. This time of year, there’s always a Todd Akin or a Jeffrey Wright who gaffes it up and then needs to be pulled off-stage with a vaudeville hook. It’s all part of the show, folks.

      Once the election is over, it becomes imperative that they should receive only so much action as is needed to keep them from open revolt. Indeed, if Roe v. Wade ever went away it would mean disaster for the GOP. There would have no hope of keeping that block together on any other issue. (Likewise, if the Democrats awoke one morning to find that black income had suddenly risen to $52,000 per household, they’d be in a full panic before breakfast.)

      • good_in_theory

        It’s a pretty decent amount of action, though. 92 laws passed at the state level last year restricting access.

        • Sean II

          No doubt, there have been attempts to chisel away the right, and they are anything but trivial. Who knows how many young women (hundreds of thousands, maybe millions?) have had the balance of their decision tipped by parental notification requirements, to name just one especially sleazy and coercive barrier.

          But you’ll notice: the action taken is never to scale. When a major party really wants something, like war in Iraq or the PPACA, they pull out the stops and get it by crook or…you know, by crook.

          For people who claim to believe abortion is nothing less than an ongoing holocaust, these guys are playing it awfully cool. They use abortion to acquire political capital, but almost never do they spend political capital on abortion. Not when it’s so urgently needed for wars and bailouts and important stuff like that.

          The action taken just doesn’t match the cause professed. These days, you can draw a bigger crowd protesting student loan debt and swipe fees than you can get by pledging to stop something 13% of Americans claim to believe is murder, pure and simple. Even the pro-life die hards have figured out that they’re never going to get a 28th amendment. Hell, by now they can plainly see that it doesn’t even matter how many Catholics end up on the Supreme Court.

          But sure as anything, Romney can count on them again this fall.

      • martinbrock

        “Blacks of the Republican spectrum” also describes libertarians well.

        • Sean II

          Indeed it does! Or is it perhaps better to call libertarians the deluded mistress of the Republican party: “He’s gonna get a divorce next year so we can run away to New Hampshire and live like we always dreamed. Wait, why are you looking at me like that? He promised! You don’t understand! You don’t know him like I do!”

    • purple_platypus

      Actually, the middle two of those four claims alone are already enough that any description of Ryan as “pro-liberty” OR particularly Randian fails the laugh test.

      I’m no fan of Rand, but the parts of her philosophy that I’ll concede are vaguely admirable (if poorly argued for) are precisely the parts Ryan seems to reject. *THIS* is the guy Libertarians have their hopes pinned on? Obama’s closer to being a libertarian than he is.

  • SimpleMachine88

    This is on the wrong comment section, but you have annoyed me BHL with your previous Republican Bingo post.

    What Insane Thing Will Democrats Say Next Bingo

    -The One Child Policy may seem wrong, but…
    -There is no sex-selective abortion in the United States
    -Social Darwinism
    -India needs population control
    -Anyone who doesn’t believe in gay marriage is a bigot
    -The Republicans are gunna put y’all back in chains
    -If you read the Constitution, it says “separation of church and state”
    -Reagan made AIDS
    -Jesus would be a democrat (to be fair, Republicans do this too)
    -The Catholic Church supports rape
    -Anyone with the last name “Bin Laden” should be locked up
    -Clarence Thomas hates Black People
    -You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent
    -What I’m worried about is that Guam will flip over
    -FREE SPACE… if you are a union member
    -Who was responsible for the recession, the Jews
    -Don’t call my bluff!
    -All Christians are homophobes
    -Princes of Greed
    -We are the 99 percent
    -War on Women
    -Underprivileged
    -Cling to their guns and religion
    -It wasn’t sexual relations, the Bible says so
    -Bush was behind 9/11
    -I am a Cherokee
    -The Republican Party is the racist party
    -the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.

    • purple_platypus

      If you can find a Democratic candidate for a high office – Congress, Senate, a state governorship, or the Presidency – saying any of the crazy conspiracy theorist stuff here, by all means tell us all about it. Certainly anything as openly racist or anti-Semitic as some of these would have been called out a long time ago.

      Of the VERY small handful of things on this list that I can imagine an actual serious candidate saying, more are likely to be said by Republicans than Democrats.

      Don’t pretend that both parties have an equal proportion of lunatics. It’s just as blatant a lie as claiming both parties are equally to blame for your deadlocked Congress.

      • SimpleMachine88

        There were four quotes by Biden, three quotes from Obama, two quotes from Democratic senators or congressmen, not including Elizabeth Warren who had two all to herself, and one from the Clinton Administration…

        • http://twitter.com/gshevlin gshevlin

          That is 10 out of 28. What about the other 18?

    • martinbrock

      The post would be much funnier if it really were a list of things that a Republican might say, rather than stupid stuff that no Republican would ever say, like “there was no rape before feminism”. A “religious right” Republican would certainly never say that. They think rape immoral because Moses said so thousands of years ago. Why not ridicule what people really think? There’s no shortage of ridiculous stiff.

      Being smarter than the dumbest person you can imagine is not much of an accomplishment.

      • Sean II

        I too am upset they never opened that thread for comments, though for a slightly different reason. There are just so many openings to play finish that sentence…

        “If you read ’50 Shades of Grey’ you’re going to hell”… well, at any rate, you’re going to purgatory for about 500 pages.

        “Marriage cures AIDS”…it certainly does if you start early enough to kill your sex life outright.

        “The solution to rape in the military is to kick out the women”…followed shortly thereafter by the men, and for good measure, the drones.

  • Jodpur

    Thinking about Paul Ryan makes me want to go back to talking about trolley problems.

  • good_in_theory

    On Republican Bingo:

    http://www.theonion.com/articles/things-that-shouldnt-be-said-in-modern-society-to,29336/

    “Throughout the three-day event, as the GOP unveils its 2012 platform and formally nominates its presidential ticket, experts predict words and phrases pertaining to science, health, and justice that are entirely unbefitting 21st-century human civilization will, on average, be voiced every 40 seconds from the podium at the Tampa Bay Times Forum.”

    But of course, one man’s basic intellectual and moral standards are another’s “Political Correctness,” I guess…