DUNCAN BLACK, blogging as Atrios, spies hypocrisy in Paul Ryan's bio:

Public high school.



Public university.



Worked for family business.



Congressional staffer, with service jobs for additional money.



Speechwriter for Jack Kemp.



Staffer for Sam Brownback.



Member of Congress.



Capitalism, just as [Ayn] Rand envisioned.

Mr Ryan, you see, has admitted to a fondness for Ayn Rand, the author of the modern classics "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged", books loved and loathed in equal measure. Joan Walsh makes a point similar to Mr Black's in a Salon piece that dubs Mr Ryan a "Randian poseur" in its headline. After noting that Mr Ryan in part paid for his out-of state tuition at an Ohio public university with Social Security survivor benefits received after the death of his father, Ms Walsh writes:

Ironically, Ryan came to national attention trying to dismantle the very program that helped him go to the college of his choice, pushing an even more radical version of President Bush’s Social Security privatization plan, which failed. He has since become the scourge of the welfare state, a man wholly supported by government who preaches against the evils of government support. He could be the poster boy for President Obama’s supposedly controversial oration about how we all owe our success to some combination of our own hard work, family backing and government support. Let’s say it together: You didn’t build that career by yourself, Congressman Ryan. Thus Paul Ryan represents the fakery at the heart of the Republican project today. It starts with the contradiction that Mr. Free Enterprise has spent his life in the bosom of government, enjoying the added protection of wingnut welfare benefactors like the Koch brothers.

The force of this line of thought escapes me. I also didn't get it when right-wingers proudly pointed out that Occupy Wall Street protesters were coordinating and documenting their protests with expensive smart-phones produced by corporations owned by malign 1%-ers. We find ourselves always in a world mostly not of our making. If we don't care for the world as we find it, and we're really serious about changing it, we'd be stupid not to use the instruments and institutions at our disposal. That the iPhone would not exist had America been transformed into an anarcho-syndicalist participatory democracy when Steve Jobs was a tween does not strike me as a compelling reason for anarcho-syndicalist participatory democrats to refuse to buy smartphones and use them in the service of social justice. Similarly, it's hard to find the objectionable inconsistency in Mr Ryan paying for school with Social Security survivor benefits, and then later arguing for reforms to the pension system he sincerely believes would have allowed his father to leave his family with even more.

The general thesis that we live under some sort of moral obligation to minimise participation in economic or political schemes we personally believe to be unjust, no matter how large the personal cost, or how infinitesimal the effect of this choice on the allegedly unjust status quo, is ridiculously, implausibly demanding. It cannot be that one is entitled to criticise the prevailing order only if one refuses to participate in it. A noble end doesn't justify taking any means, of course. But what if refusing to act within an allegedly unjust system only entrenches the system by ceding control to those unbothered by its supposed iniquities? In that case, morality plausibly asks us to make the best use possible of the objectionable tools we find at hand. At the very least, morality doesn't forbid it.

In practice, arguments like Mr Black's and Ms Walsh's tend to come to the silly idea that one's ideological opponents are duty-bound (by their own lights!) to either unilaterally disarm or shut up. Heads, I win; tails, you lose. It's a cheap trick. The argument as usually deployed also depends on a combination of lazy partisan Manichaeism and the naive practice of taking politicians at their word. Paul Ryan is an elected official whose views therefore fall squarely within the ambit of conventional political wisdom. Despite his professed admiration for Ayn Rand, and the ardent wishes of his admirers and detractors alike, Mr Ryan is far from a laissez faire radical. As James Antle notes in the American Conservative, Mr Ryan

...not only voted for but helped pass Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit that was the largest new entitlement since the Great Society and which added trillions to the rickety healthcare program’s already considerable unfunded liabilities. He passionately exhorted his House Republican colleagues to vote for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and then was one of only 20 to actually do so. Ryan supported bailing out the auto industry as well as Wall Street.

If Mr Ryan is guilty of inconsistency, it's because his rhetoric doesn't square with his voting record, not because he attended a public university or worked his whole adult life in politics.

Anyway, Mr Ryan's favourite proposals for entitlement reform are sincerely intended to improve the system by saving it from unsustainable fiscal imbalance. One may honestly believe that if Mr Ryan has his way, America's seniors will be dining on Tender Vittles and expiring in the streets on their rusted, no-longer-Medicare-subsidised Rascal scooters. But there is nothing in his voting record or current proposals to suggest that Mr Ryan intends this result, or that he believes there to be anything at all objectionable about receiving Social Security or Medicare benefits, much less an education at State U. Indeed, Mr Ryan seems to me intent on repairing defects in the system so that the system can survive to go on delivering benefits.

One might think the fact that Paul Ryan is a terrible Randian, as Connor Friedersdorf establishes at length, would come as a bit of relief to liberals who would rather not see a Randian "radical for capitalism" a heartbeat away from the presidency. But, alas, relief is not the reaction one observes. I suppose the rhetorical intuition is that promulgating the myth that Mr Ryan is a half-closeted adhherent of a supposedly pernicious fringe ideology helps poison the Romney/Ryan well. And I suppose it does. That's why one still hears of Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers from time to time. Now, as it happens, Ayn Rand actually staked out a position on the permissibility of accepting public funds in a 1966 essay, "The Question of Scholarships". If we're going to pretend to hold Mr Ryan to his notional Randian standards, perhaps we ought to at least see what Rand actually said on this question. So here you go:

The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships, have no right to them; those who oppose them, have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims. Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others—the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it. The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of accepting social security, unemployment insurance or other payments of that kind. It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the “right” to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration. The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of government research grants.

Make what you will of this argument (I think it's terrible), but its implications are easy enough to see. If Mr Ryan is not really a Randian, and he's not, then Rand condemns him. But if he really does "oppose all forms of welfare statism", as some of Mr Ryan's alarmed left-wing critics would have us think, then he is, on Randian grounds at least, quite in the clear.