“This is America. How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills, raise their hand? . . . . I’m an Ayn Rander.”
— CNBC’s Rick Santelli calling for the uprising of a Tea Party Movement, Feb. 19, 2009
How many of you watched Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential announcement last weekend? Yeah, me neither. Yet, most of us have seen his face before, only it was not a face, it was his Congressional budget plan, which has many people either confused or concerned. But Ayn Rand, at least, must be smiling from her upper east side townhouse in the afterlife.
Mr. Ryan’s Plan, called “The Path to Prosperity” for America, was a blueprint for minimizing the size of government which made him a darling of the Tea Party. You know those guys, the ones that demand that the US government takes its hands off their Medicare?
Well, in a way, Mr. Ryan’s budget does that — after he’s gutted Medicare so that the wealthy get a tax break and your mom and dad pay extra for what will end up as a $6,000 Medicare voucher. At least Mr. Ryan’s hands will no longer be on Medicare. There will be much less of a program for him to put his hands on. $6,000 won’t be enough to pay for a year’s worth of prescription drugs.
Oh yes, we’re very familiar with Mr. Ryan, who along with Mr. Romney is a devotee of the Ayn Rand philosophy of virtuous selfishness, or as Ms. Rand would say, “concern with one’s own interests.” It was Ms. Rand who said the equation of selfishness with evil had caused “the arrested moral development of mankind” and needed to be rejected.