Posted on 08/14/2012 10:12:18 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Behold, the self-deceiving power of unswerving progressivism on an ideological tear. Joe Scarborough's face, at least, seems to suggest that he’s thinking somewhere along the lines of "Is this crackpot for real?," but Matthews really steals the show here.
You know what Ryan believes in? Getting rid of the cap-gains tax, period! So he's a rad—he's not just a middle-of-the-road guy who wants to make the tough decisions—he’s a guy who wants to help out the winners in society, and make it a little rough for people that are riding along, depending on the government. He doesn't like those people. Especially. No, no. I think he's Ayn Rand "
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You think that Paul Ryan doesn't like people that are struggling?
MATTHEWS: Let's slow down, for jumping on the way I said it. I don't think he's sitting there worried about—I don't think he's Tip O'Neill, worried about the people on Pell Grants. I don't think he's worried about the working poor. I think he's looking for the winners. And that's who he wants to incentivize. And by the way, that's one of the weird things I notice about the conservative movement is. They believe that the way to get rich people to work harder is to give them more money. The way to get the poor people to work harder is to screw them a little bit.
Okay, let’s just trace out this logic for a moment here. A little more than roughly forty percent of the voting public is currently planning on voting for the Romney/Ryan ticket, and approximately half of the American population self-identifies as conservative. Millionaires and billionaires do not comprise half of the population; ergo, most people in the conservative movement are not tremendously wealthy. And yet, the conservative movement has not been receptive to President Obama’s fundamentally nonserious ploy to ‘reduce the deficit’ by getting everyone to “pay their fair share,” a.k.a. by hiking taxes on the wealthy. How can this be? Are conservatives just self-defeating financial masochists who love to watch greedy fat cats get richer, or could there perhaps be an alternative theory? Could it be that conservatives are interested in helping the poor, but perhaps believe that the most effective, penetrating, righteous method to enhance the living standards and opportunities of the greatest number of people is to foster a prosperous, growing economy in which an intrusive and inefficient government doesn’t wreck entrepreneurial incentives with redistribution and overregulation? Maybe?
Nah, that can’t be it. You got me, Chris Matthews. We’re just hateful and apathetic towards everyone who isn’t wealthy, including ourselves. That’s us in a nutshell!
And by the way, what is it all these liberals and media outlets trying to associate Paul Ryan as some sort of crazed, diehard Ayn Rand fan, and saying so as if it is an absolute and undeniable given that any interest whatsoever in Ayn Rand’s ideas is a bad thing? I’m pretty sure that Atlas Shrugged is a historically long and well-selling book, and that sales have spiked in the past few years. Heaven forbid anybody walk away from reading her novels with any productive thoughts about the power of self-ownership and rugged individualism, or anything non-statist like that. Ew, gross.
I just finished reading Atlas Shrugged. I was moved to TEARS at her description of America under the Lyin’ King’s Boot. How DID she know this back in 1957? It’s Amazing.
It’s official. Prissy Matthews is too stupid to live.
It’s official. Prissy Matthews is too stupid to live.
It’s official. Prissy Matthews is too stupid to live.
Sorry for the triple post.
How many of his viewers know who Ayn is?
Can’t be said enough.
$10 Says Chris Matthews have never read anything from Ayn Rand. Perhaps if he did read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ he would see life in Obamaville a lot differently.
Toss in another $10 if Chris Matthews doesn’t know under what political system Ayn Rand grew up. She wrote from first hand experience living in a world Obama wants to ‘fundamnetally transform’ us into. Thank GOD we are less than 3 months from fundamentally transforming his ass back to private citizen status.
Ayn Rand must be mentioned whenever Obamamedia discuss Ryan. This might cause some Democrats to go beyond their approved reading list, and read Rand. The rest of the retards will be contented to think Rand was a travel agent.
“Chris Matthews: Paul Ryan “is Ayn Rand” and wants to “screw” the poor”
As compared to you, Matthews—a common c**ksucker.
I would prefer we transform his a$$ into federal prisoner status.
Is Chrissy still suffering from his idiotpathic (not to be confused with idiopathic) neuropathy?
Didn't Ben Franklin say something about not letting people in poverty get comfortable in their poverty. Sometimes to get someone back on track they need to get screwed a little bit. I didn't take my schooling seriously until I had a few bad years of grades and got into academic trouble. I then refocused, buckled down, and got my degree. Best decision I've ever made. And it's one that I attribute to being allowed to fail.
Quite a lot of them hear about Rand from condemnatory secondary sources, and for them that's good enough. Back when Publius and I were hammering the Atlas Shrugged threads we'd get an anti-Rand poster throwing a Bob The Angry Flower cartoon in, which mocked Rand's characters for not realizing that they needed to grow food to eat. In fact, she spent two chapters on that topic - the critic had never read the book he was mocking. Funny cartoon but not for the reasons intended.
Rand is one of those authors - Machiavelli is another - whose popular reputation is quite at odds with the actual body of their published works. There's plenty to criticize with respect to the novel, but dismissing it as intellectually barren is a mark of ignorance. Which brings us back to Chrissy Matthews...
There I was in 1978 in a Philosophy of Education class when we were put into groups and assigned to form the perfect society. This was following out reading Brave New World and Plato’s Republic. The professor gets to me and sees I am wearing a tee shirt with the name of my rock band ANTHEM on it. She knew I was going to be trouble.
[ I just finished reading Atlas Shrugged. I was moved to TEARS at her description of America under the Lyin’ King’s Boot. How DID she know this back in 1957? It’s Amazing. ]
My fault, I totally went back in time and brought her to the present day for a month so she could research for her book...
OH, so it was YOU, was it?
You must have used Reardon Metal and that Secret Power Source Generator to power your time machine! :-)
Ryan has already addressed this.
“I, like millions of young people in America, read Rand’s novels when I was young. I enjoyed them,” Ryan says. “They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman,” a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. “But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist.”
“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.
She knew it, because she saw it first hand in communist Russia.
She wasn’t writing about the future, she was writing about things that had already happened.
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