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enlarge Paul Ryan’s rise as a supposed “serious thinker” is a sad symbol of our political class’s depraved and sadistic sense of morality. And I don’t say this just because Ryan’s truly Satanic budget plan would destroy the social safety net to fund more tax cuts for rich people. It’s also that our elite media has decided that a hardcore disciple of Ayn Rand is somebody who is actually worth listening to instead of being laughed out of the room. For despite Ryan’s pretensions that he’s just an honest wonk who’s seeking out serious solutions to our nation’s debt problem, the reality is that he’s a vindictive mega-dork who’s coming extremely close to enacting his nerdroid revenge fantasies on the American public. I mean, look, no one who is a devoted Randian cares about anything except redistributing wealth from the unworthy looter class (i.e., 99% of the population) to the super class of highly-productive rich people (i.e., Charlie Sheen, Paris Hilton, LeBron James, LeBron James’ mom and Paul Ryan). And Ryan even admits that it was Rand who inspired him to get involved in politics: “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” And like other Randroid bed-wetters , Ryan believes that social insurance programs that have saved countless people from poverty are actually a grand form of tyranny holding back the creative potential of our oppressed producer class: At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand’s writings when he told his audience that, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill  . . .  is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict – individualism versus collectivism.” In that struggle, Ryan argued that shifting Social Security (which he called a “collectivist system”) toward personal investment accounts was not only good policy, but would change the political landscape, according to a recording of the event made by its host, The Atlas Society. “If we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing Social Security, think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist. They will be an owner of society.  . . .  That’s that many more people in America who are not going to listen to the likes of Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, the collectivist, class-warfare-breathing demagogues,” said Ryan. Except, unlike all the capitalists on Wall Street, all of these new worker-capitalists wouldn’t have been bailed out when their Social Security accounts got wiped out by the stock market crash in 2008. And yes, for the record, Ryan did vote for the bailout in 2008 : Ryan said his vote for the bailout was influenced by Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, a popular book among conservatives that argues that Nazism and other fascist movements were actually left wing in origin, and his belief that a second Depression would threaten capitalism—and rescue Obama’s presidency. “I’m a limited-government, free-enterprise guy, but TARP… represented a moment where we had no good options and we were about to fall into a deflationary spiral,” he said. In other words, he’s all for capitalism until our Randroid supermen look like they might actually lose their ill-gotten fortunes. At that point he’s willing to step in and write them a big blank check. In fact, a cursory review of Ryan’s voting record reveals that he really doesn’t have any problem with government spending as long as it goes to war or corporate welfare programs. Let’s review the facts : -Ryan voted for the Iraq war. Cost: $700 billion . Ryan voted for the Medicare prescription drug corporate welfare scheme. Cost: $552 billion over 10 years. It also goes without saying that Ryan voted against letting the government negotiate lower prices for Medicare drug purchases. Which, uh, would have saved taxpayers a lot of money. Ryan voted for the Bush tax cuts. Cost: $1.7 trillion . So yes, Ryan is perfectly happy to increase the deficit as long as it goes to defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street tycoons. Deficit spending that provides a safety net for the poor and the middle class, however, is socialism. Any journalist writing about Ryan’s plans should not buy into Ryan’s claims that he’s just an honest man who’s so gosh-darned worried about the budget deficit. Instead they should look at his record and conclude that he’s just your standard GOP class warrior who’s trying to set up his rich pals for yet another round of looting the middle class. Any other conclusion is, frankly, deeply unserious.