Truth Out has Paul Krugman’s article US Conservatives Pile on the Excuses.

Thus someone like Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, starts by claiming to be a deficit hawk. Push him really hard, however, on why in that case he advocates big tax cuts, and he’ll shift to arguing that big government (as opposed to not-paid-for government) is the real problem. But if you push hard on that, it turns out that there’s yet another layer: the claim that policies like taxing the rich to help pay for social insurance are immoral, because people have a right to keep the wealth they created — which is why suggesting that no plutocrat is an island is heresy.

This onion structure is why you should never believe reasonable-sounding conservatives who say that you’re attacking a straw man, that “nobody believes” that wealth creators owe nothing to society.

Oh, yes they do — it’s usually hidden inside a couple of socially acceptable excuses, but at their core Mr. Ryan and people like him believe that they’re characters in “Atlas Shrugged.”

I think that last statement is key to understanding Paul Ryan, and is key to understanding the fallacy of their prescription for society.

Up until about sophomore year in college, I was a big fan of Ayn Rand and her books including “Atlas Shrugged”.  I thought that the book of fiction explained a lot of the problems our country faced in real life. The big, bad government hampered the marvelous efforts of the entrepreneurs.  The welfare recipients were just lazy parasites.

Then I undertook to write a research paper for an economics course that I was taking.  I don’t remember how I came to decide to write a paper focused on what was called back then “cultural deprivation”.  As I researched the subject, I came to understand that there were children who grew up in an environment that was lacking certain “cultural advantages” such as a home life where parents could devote time to reading to and talking to their children starting from infancy.  Statistically speaking, these children had much less chance of succeeding in education and careers that depended on education.  They did not come in contact with role models that could demonstrate the way that education could lead to a better life.  These children had no way of figuring out a way to a better life, and didn’t even have a clue that there was a way out.

You could not blame the parents for their children’s predicament either.  The parents were struggling so hard to provide for the basic needs of their children, that they could not provide cultural amenities such as books, magazines, and newspapers in the home.  Probably worse, was that they could not devote as much time with their children as they would have liked because they had to devote so much time to providing the bare necessities of life.  In earlier times, where generations of families stayed pretty much where they were born, older generations could provide backup for the younger, child rearing generation.  The way our industrial society was structured, more families had generations that moved to where the jobs were and severed the ties to their support systems.  The parents of children who were “culturally deprived” were probably “culturally deprived” as children themselves.

Of course, we don’t live in a binary world, where all people are characters from “Atlas Shrugged” or where none of the people are characters from “Atlas Shrugged”.   The problem with the world view portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged” was that it was more appropriate, perhaps, for the Communist, totalitarian societies in which Ayn Rand grew up, rather than in the Democratic mixed economies of countries like the United States.  There was no place in the “Atlas Shrugged” world for the idea that there may be deprived people who could be helped with some intervention from society.  Nor could she fathom that society could be improved by giving help to such deprived people.

So at about the age of 18 or so, I grew out of my infatuation with the Ayn Rand philosophy.  Unfortunately, their are people like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney who never grew up.  They are suffering in their own way from a different form of “cultural deprivation”.  They have no clue as to the problems that certain people not in their “class” may suffer at the hands of people in their “class”.  The people in the Romney class want to set up a society that is based on an unrealistic view of the composition of people in that society.  What works to the advantage of the people raised with all the proper amenities works to the distinct disadvantage of the people who were not so fortunate when they were children.

You should not consign people to a place in society based on what they lacked as children. They were very unlikely to be able to overcome their disadvantage on their own.  Notice, I said unlikely.  There are always exceptional people in any population – the very idea is the foundation of “Atlas Shrugged”.  You cannot point to these exceptional people and claim that everybody in their situation should have been able to rise above their circumstances.  Sounds like Garrison Keillor’s description of Lake Woebegone where all the children are above average.

Notice also, that what I presented here is the point that President Obama was making when he said successful people did not make it entirely on their own.

Only because reader HankH asked, I set up an Elizabeth Warren fundraising page called SturbridgeSSG.

If you want to contribute to the Elizabeth Warren campaign, you can use the above link or you can use the generic donation link.

It makes no difference to me which  you use.  I don’t need any credit for helping get Elizabeth Warren elected.  I just want her to be elected.

Mother Jones has the story 14 Wacky “Facts” Kids Will Learn in Louisiana’s Voucher Schools.

1. Dinosaurs and humans probably hung out: “Bible-believing Christians cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation. Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years.”—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

Certainly this cannot be one of the wacky facts.  Didn’t the movie Jurassic Park definitively prove that dinosaurs and humans hung out?

I guess the selection of Paul Ryan as the Vice Presidential candidate to run with Mitt Romney caught the Obama team by surprise. The announcement came at 9AM and I did not receive the email about this video until 6PM. 🙂

Here is the email I received about this video.

The Agenda Project Action Fund presents: Romney Girl.

The Nation of Change has republished the Robert Reich column Erasing W.

Republicans want to obliterate any trace of the administration that told America there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and led us into a devastating war; turned a $5 trillion projected budget surplus into a $6 trillion deficit; gave the largest tax cut in a generation to the richest Americans in history; handed out a mountain of corporate welfare to the oil and gas industry, pharmaceutical companies, and military contractors like Halliburton (uniquely benefiting the vice president); whose officials turned a blind eye to Wall Street shenanigans that led to the worst financial calamity since the Great Crash of 1929 and then persuaded Congress to bail out the Street with the largest taxpayer-funded giveaway of all time.

And when we try to remind people of recent history, the Republicans try the old saw, “Isn’t it time to stop blaming George Bush?”  Have we stopped blaming Herbert Hoover yet?   Perhaps when Republicans forget Jimmy Carter, we can forget George Bush.  Although the damage George Bush did far exceeds anything Jim Carter can be blamed for, so that might not be a fair trade.

The Washington Post has the story Biden: McConnell decided to withhold all cooperation even before we took office.

Grunwald has Joe Biden on the record making a striking charge. Biden says that during the transition, a number of Republican Senators privately confided to him that Mitch McConnell had given them the directive that there was to be no cooperation with the new administration — because he had decided that “we can’t let you succeed.”

Here’s the relevant passage, from page 207:

Biden says that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any cooperation on many votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, `Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ he recalls. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’” Biden says.

The vice president says he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along these lines.

Now is it clear enough that the lack of bipartisanship in Congress does not come equally from both parties?

Do you suppose that when Scott Brown went to the Senate that Mitch McConnell didn’t tell him about the plan?  Yet, Scott Brown tries to make out that he is the neutral voice in the war between two extremes.  He actually stands in the middle between one extreme and moderation.  That still puts him way toward the extreme.

Does this make you even angrier at Obama for bending over backwards to get Republican cooperation when his administration was told in no uncertain terms that there would be no cooperation?

boston.com has the story Romney names Paul Ryan his No. 2.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney tapped Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his vice presidential running mate on Saturday, turning to the architect of a conservative and intensely controversial long-term budget plan to remake Medicare and cut trillions in federal spending.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee says “This is a major unforced error by Mitt Romney.”

As long as we are in a race to the bottom, there is no sense in one side quitting.

Is there anything untrue about this ad?

Reader RichardH sent me the link to The New York Times editorial, Mr. Romney Hits Bottom on Welfare, as a response to my previous post Romney’s welfare-to-work attack on Obama not quite accurate, experts say.

From The New York Times editorial:

Mitt Romney’s campaign has hit new depths of truth-twisting with its accusation that President Obama plans to “gut welfare reform” by ending federal work requirements. The claim is blatantly false, but it says a great deal about Mr. Romney’s increasingly desperate desire to define the president as something he is not.

My confirmation bias likes this editorial.

I do sometimes wonder how the media can say things are “not quite accurate”,  “depths of truth-twisting”, “claim is blatantly false”, and still not be able to simply say “it is a lie”.