On Ed's radio show this morning, one of his guests was Mike Papantonio and he used the word Vouchercare over and over. It was perfect and should become the mantra for the dem party.
Rachel Maddow explains the difference between what a fiscal conservative believes and the supply-side economic proposals Paul Ryan has made, designed to direct money to a wealthy elite, reflective of his interest in Ayn Rand.
A film adaptation of the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, opened this past Friday. The release of the film has coincided with a resurgence of popularity for Rand on the American Right. The trailer for Atlas Shrugged had its world premier at this year's CPAC conference, the Tea Party group FreedomWorks has rolled out a massive campaign to promote the film, and the story's opening line — "Who is John Galt" — has appeared on numerous signs at Tea Party rallies.
At the same time, some of the right's leading political and media lights have heaped praise upon Rand. The author of the Republicans' new budget plan to gut Medicare and Medicaid, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), has said Rand is the reason he entered politics. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) have both declared themselves devotees of her writing. Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has his law clerks watch the film adaptation of Rand's book The Fountainhead. She's also received accolades from right-wing pundits Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, John Stossel, and Andrew Napolitano.
During her lifetime, Rand advocated "the virtue of selfishness," declared altruism to be "evil," opposed Medicare and all forms of government support for the middle-class and the poor, and condemned Christianity for advocating love and compassion for the less fortunate:
Rand also dismissed the feminist movement as a "false" and "phony" issue, said a female commander in chief would be "unspeakable," characterized Arabs as "almost totally primitive savages," and called government efforts to aid the handicapped and educate "subnormal children" an attempt to "bring everybody to the level of the handicapped."
As for the new Atlas Shrugged film, it made $1.7 million in its first three days in theaters, reasonable but unspectacular numbers for a limited release on 299 screens. But box-office watchers looking to see if the Tea Party represents a discrete market would have been disappointed. The movie grossed just $5,608 per theater over that time period, hardly a sign that groups were buying out theaters or that the movie was a pop culture phenomenon. By contrast, An Inconvenient Truth took in $70,333 per theater during its first five days on screens. That number fell to $17,615 per theater in its second week, but that number is still higher than Atlas Shrugged's more widely-available debut. And Atlas Shrugged's numbers look positively puny next to another culture-war adaptation of a popular book, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which raked in $125,185,971 over its first five days in theaters.
The Republican Congressman is trying to rewrite his past statements about author and philosopher, Ayn Rand. MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell explains the contradiction in tonight's Rewrite.
But Ryan did not actually go home to Janesville, the blue-collar town where he was born and raised [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ryan ]. Janesville is a Democratic city that backed the ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in 2008, and that might well do so again in 2012. Indeed, the headline on a news story from Janesville [ http://host.madison.com/ ] published Sunday read: "Residents and Officials Say Ryan Brings Welcome Attention Even if He Won't Get Their Vote."
"My veins run with cheese, bratwurst and a little Spotted Cow, Leines and Miller," he declared, mentioning three of the state's many beers. "I was raised on the Packers, Badgers, Bucks and Brewers. I like to hunt here, fish here, snowmobile here, and I even think ice fishing is interesting.”
not by the progressive political ideals of the first Wisconsinite to lead a national political ticket into serious competition for the White House: governor, senator and 1924 presidential candidate Robert M. La Follette [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._La_Follette,_Sr. ].
In fact, the House Budget Committee chairman is expressly at odds with his home-state's progressive tradition.
In 2010, Ryan told conservative commentator Glenn Beck [ http://www.theblaze.com/stories/flashback-glenn-beck-interview-with-paul-ryan-from-2010/ (also excerpted in the second item {first YouTube} in the post to which this is a reply)]: "What I’ve been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today. And so to me it’s really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate—so people can actually see what this ideology means and where it’s going to lead us and how it attacks the American idea."
"I love you!" gushed Beck.
Beck referred to progressivism as "a cancer."
"Exactly," replied Ryan. "Look, I come from—I’m calling you from Janesville, Wisconsin where I’m born and raised, where we raise our family. (It's) 35 miles from Madison. I grew up hearing about this stuff. This stuff came from these German intellectuals to Madison-University of Wisconsin and sort of out there from the beginning of the last century. So this is something we are familiar with where I come from. It never sat right with me. And as I grew up, I learned more about the founders and reading the Austrians and others that this is really a cancer because it basically takes the notion that our rights come from God and nature and turns it on its head and says, no, no, no, no, no, they come from government, and we here in government are here to give you your rights and therefore ration, redistribute and regulate your rights. It’s a complete affront of the whole idea of this country and that is to me what we as conservatives, or classical liberals if you want to get technical."
La Follette and "those first progressives," Ryan said, "tried to use populism and popular ideas as a means to getting—detaching people from the Constitution and founding principles to pave the way for the centralized bureaucratic welfare state."
O.K., we know what Ryan thinks about progressives, contemporary and historic, and about the ideals for which La Follette and the first progressives.
So what would La Follette, the true progressive, have thought of Ryan?
Well, Ryan is most identified with the conservative campaign to mangle Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, while La Follette and the Wisconsin progressives fought to establish old-age pensions and protections.
Ryan is proudly opposed to health-care reform, while La Follette (and, it should be noted, Teddy Roosevelt) began talking up national health care in the early 1900s.
Ryan wants to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, while La Follette and the Progressives declared themselves [ http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/archive/resources/documents/ch27_03.htm ] for “a taxation policy providing for immediate reductions upon moderate incomes, large increases in the inheritance tax rates upon large estates to prevent the indefinite accumulation by inheritance of great fortunes in a few hands” and “taxes upon excess profits to penalize profiteering.”
While Ryan’s a steady critic of government, the Progressives wanted to nationalize the railroads and utility companies. And they declared in their 1924 platform [ http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/archive/resources/documents/ch27_03.htm ]: “We demand that the power of the federal government be used to crush private monopoly, not to foster it.”
Where La Follette and the progressives sought to cut federal spending on the military, Ryan has consistently sought to increase funding for the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned. La Follette’s 1924 Progressive Party platform called for the “curtailment of the $800 million now annually expended for the Army and Navy in preparation for future wars” and “the recovery of the hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from the Treasury through fraudulent war contracts and the corrupt leasing of the public resources.”
While Ryan has been a steady supporter of wars and occupations abroad, as well as Wall Street-sponsored “free trade” agreements — which have devastated his hometown of Janesville — the Progressives denounced “the mercenary system of foreign policy under recent administrations in the interests of financial imperialists, oil monopolists and international bankers, which has at times degraded our State Department from its high service as a strong and kindly intermediary of defenseless governments to a trading outpost for those interests and concession-seekers engaged in the exploitations of weaker nations, as contrary to the will of the American people, destructive of domestic development and provocative of war.”
Ryan’s right that the first Progressives favored referendums. They even wanted “to extend the initiative and referendum to the federal government, and to insure a popular referendum for or against war except in cases of actual invasion.”
La Follette and the pioneering progressives of Wisconsin believed in democracy [ http://www.uppitywis.org/blogarticle/happy-birthday-fighting-bob-la-follette ]—political and economic. They wanted Americans to be truly empowered to shape their communities, their states, their nation and their future. It was a radical vision. Far more radical than what most contemporary "progressives" espouse.
The "first progressives" so ardently decried by Ryan challenged the crony capitalism of Wall Street and Washington. They believed the the combination of corporate capital and political power created a toxic combination that threatened to overwhelm the power of the people and render democracy meaningless.
More than 40 years ago the philosopher John Rawls, in his influential political work “A Theory of Justice,” implored the people of the world to shed themselves of their selfish predispositions and to assume, for the sake of argument, that they were ignorant. He imposed this unwelcome constraint not so that his readers — mostly intellectuals, but also students, politicians and policy makers — would find themselves in a position of moribund stupidity but rather so they could get a grip on fairness.
Rawls charged his readers to design a society from the ground up, from an original position [ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/ ], and he imposed the ignorance constraint so that readers would abandon any foreknowledge of their particular social status — their wealth, their health, their natural talents, their opportunities or any other goodies that the cosmos may have thrown their way. In doing so, he hoped to identify principles of justice that would best help individuals maximize their potential, fulfill their objectives (whatever they may happen to be) and live a good life. He called this presumption the “veil of ignorance.”
The idea behind the veil of ignorance is relatively simple: to force us to think outside of our parochial personal concerns in order that we consider others. What Rawls saw clearly is that it is not easy for us to put ourselves in the position of others. We tend to think about others always from our own personal vantage; we tend to equate another person’s predicament with our own. Imagining what it must be like to be poor, for instance, we import presumptions about available resources, talents and opportunities — encouraging, say, the homeless to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and to just get a job, any job, as if getting a job is as simple as filling out an application. Meanwhile, we give little thought to how challenging this can be for those who suffer from chronic illnesses or disabling conditions. What Rawls also saw clearly was that other classic principles of justice, like the golden rule or mutual benevolence, are subject to distortion precisely because we tend to do this.
Nowadays, the veil of ignorance is challenged by a powerful but ancient contender: the veil of opulence. While no serious political philosopher actually defends such a device — the term is my own — the veil of opulence runs thick in our political discourse. Where the veil of ignorance offers a test for fairness from an impersonal, universal point of view — “What system would I want if I had no idea who I was going to be, or what talents and resources I was going to have?” — the veil of opulence offers a test for fairness from the first-person, partial point of view: “What system would I want if I were so-and-so?” These two doctrines of fairness [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/obama-vs-romney-battle-of-the-fairness-doctrines/ ] — the universal view and the first-person view — are both compelling in their own way, but only one of them offers moral clarity impartial enough to guide our policy decisions.
Of course, the veil of opulence is not limited to tax policy. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia advanced related logic in their oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act [ http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/11-398-Tuesday.pdf ] in March. “[T]he mandate is forcing these [young] people,” Justice Alito said, “to provide a huge subsidy to the insurance companies … to subsidize services that will be received by somebody else.” By suggesting in this way that the policy was unfair, Alito encouraged the court to assess the injustice themselves. “If you were healthy and young,” Justice Alito implied, “why should you be made to bear the burden of the sick and old?”
The answer to these questions, when posed in this way, is clear. It seems unfair, unjust, to be forced to pay so much more than someone of lesser means. We should all be free to use our money and our resources however we see fit. And so, the opulence argument for fairness gets off the ground.
It is one thing for the very well off to make these arguments. What is curious is that frequently the same people who pose these questions are not themselves wealthy [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/us/even-critics-of-safety-net-increasingly-depend-on-it.html?pagewanted=all ], nor even particularly healthy. Instead, they ask these questions under the supposition that they are insisting upon fairness. But the veil of opulence operates only under the guise of fairness. It is rather a distortion of fairness, by virtue of the partiality that it smuggles in. It asks not whether a policy is fair given the huge range of advantages or hardships the universe might throw at a person but rather whether it is fair that a very fortunate person should shoulder the burdens of others. That is, the veil of opulence insists that people imagine that resources and opportunities and talents are freely available to all, that such goods are widely abundant, that there is no element of randomness or chance that may negatively impact those who struggle to succeed but sadly fail through no fault of their own. It blankets off the obstacles that impede the road to success. It turns a blind eye to the adversity that some people, let’s face it, are born into. By insisting that we consider public policy from the perspective of the most-advantaged, the veil of opulence obscures the vagaries of brute luck.
But wait, you may be thinking, what of merit? What of all those who have labored and toiled and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to make their lives better for themselves and their families? This is an important question indeed. Many people work hard for their money and deserve to keep what they earn. An answer is offered by both doctrines of fairness.
The veil of opulence assumes that the playing field is level, that all gains are fairly gotten, that there is no cosmic adversity. In doing so, it is partial to the fortunate — for fortune here is entirely earned or deserved. The veil of ignorance, on the other hand, introduces the possibility that one might fall on hard luck or that one is not born into luck [ http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/fox-news-host-corrects-obamas-silver-spoon-quote/ ]. It never once closes out the possibility that that same person might take steps to overcome that bad luck. In this respect, it is not partial to the fortunate but impartial to all. Some will win by merit, some will win by lottery. Others will lose by laziness, while still others will lose because the world has thrown them some unfathomably awful disease or some catastrophically terrible car accident. It is an illusion of prosperity [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiQ_T5C3hIM&feature=player_embedded ] to believe that each of us deserves everything we get.
If there’s one thing about fairness, it is fundamentally an impartial [ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/impartiality/ ] notion, an idea that restricts us from privileging one group over another. When asking about fairness, we cannot ask whether X policy is fair for me, or whether Y policy is fair for someone with a yacht and two vacation homes. We must ask whether Z policy is fair, full stop. What we must ask here is whether the policy could be applied to all; whether it is the sort of system with which we could live, if we were to end up in one of the many socioeconomic groupings that make up our diverse community, whether most-advantaged or least-advantaged, fortunate or unfortunate. This is why the veil of ignorance is a superior test for fairness over the veil of opulence. It tackles the universality of fairness without getting wrapped up in the particularities of personal interest. If you were to start this world anew, unaware of who you would turn out to be, what sort of die would you be willing to cast?
We already employ this veil of ignorance logic in a wide range of areas, many of which are not limited to politics. An obvious case is in the game of football. During draft season, the N.F.L. gives the losingest team the opportunity to take first pick at their player of choice. Just recently, the Indianapolis Colts, the worst team last year, selected as their new quarterback the aptly named Andrew Luck [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/sports/football/luck-griffin-then-it-gets-interesting.html ], arguably the most promising player in recent memory. In the interest of firming up the game, in the interest of being fair, the N.F.L. decided long ago to give the worst teams in football the best shot at improving their game. At the beginning of the season, nobody knows who is going to be the worst off, but they all agree to the draft rules.
The question of fairness has widespread application throughout our political discourse. It affects taxation, health care, education, social safety nets and so on. The veil of opulence would have us screen for fairness by asking what the most fortunate among us are willing to bear. The veil of ignorance would have us screen for fairness by asking what any of us would be willing to bear, if it were the case that we, or the ones we love, might be born into difficult circumstances or, despite our hard work, blindsided by misfortune. Society is in place to correct for the injustices of the universe, to ensure that our lives can run smoothly despite the stuff that is far out of our control: not to hand us what we need, but to give us the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness. The veil of ignorance helps us see that. The veil of opulence keeps us in the dark.
Christian voters must choose, Ayn Rand or Jesus. Prominent GOP leaders have praised Rand's philosophy and beliefs. But Rand made it clear that you can't follow her and Christ. The GOP budget, authored by Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, is the perfect example. Read Rand's quotes (all cited) and the praise from GOP leaders and conservative pundits for her philosophy, thinking, and morality at http://www.americanvaluesnetwork.org .
Christian voters must choose, Ayn Rand or Jesus. Prominent GOP leaders have praised Rand's philosophy and beliefs. But Rand made it clear that you can't follow her and Christ. The GOP budget, authored by Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, is the perfect example. Read Rand's quotes (all cited) and the praise from GOP leaders and conservative pundits for her philosophy, thinking, and morality at http://www.americanvaluesnetwork.org .
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