On August 11, 2012, Phil Fox Rose writes on Patheos.com:
…what I am looking at here are the core values that guide the person. In 2009, Ryan said, in his own congressional campaign video available here, unless they take it down:
Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did a fantastic job explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and that, to me, is what matters most.
In case you haven’t read Ayn Rand, here is her “morality of capitalism”: survival of the fittest and radical individualism. In Rand’s world, groups are always weak. Leaders of groups are always manipulators. And religion, specifically, is held up as a foolish enterprise designed to pacify people, so they don’t shine out as the glorious individuals they could be. There is not one shred, not one hint, of people being authentically motivated by serving others or the common good. It couldn’t be more starkly presented than in The Fountainhead, where the Enemy is a religiously-minded person, someone who almost entered the ministry but shied away even from that level of personal excellence, whose goal in life is to sabotage individual greatness. The hero, in contrast, is an arrogant, truly despicable genius, who is driven only by personal achievement, stepping on other men and in one case date-raping a woman (though Rand defended the portrayal saying it was clear she wanted it.)
Ayn Rand attributed “failure” to deadbeats and leeches, rather than attacking a rigged system, which perpetuates concentrated ownership of the non-human factor of production and essentially leaves the majority to fend for a livelihood on wages and salaries under attack by job destroying and degrading tectonic shifts in the technologies of production––shifting production off of people onto to “things” embodied in productive land, structures, human-intelligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. I have always advocated taking personal responsibility and strengthening the individual, but that requires opportunities for EVERY American to participate and contribute to the production of products and services, as well as education. With jobs being displaced by global cheap labor or machines, the ONLY path to wider prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice is for us to engage in policies specifically aimed at broadening private, individual ownership in future income-producing productive capital investments to spur economic growth. The result will be a citizenry comprised of stronger individuals who will be empowered to become the best that they can be as human beings and contribute innovation and invention to society.
