Paul Ryan & Ayn Rand

Vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is  a social conservative, a devout Roman Catholic with a  strong pro-life record.  And yet one of his most formative influences is reportedly Ayn Rand, the radical libertarian, an atheist who viciously attacked Christianity because it teaches love and compassion, advocating instead “the virtue of selfishness.”  Those two influences, Catholicism and Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, don’t seem to gibe.

Democrats are playing up the connection between Ryan and Rand in order to portray him as a heartless amoral extremist.  Here Ryan tries to set the record straight:

“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.

via Ryan Shrugged – Robert Costa – National Review Online.

For a more detailed examination of how Ryan now differs from Rand, see this.