Paul Ryan: Chiseled abs, no remorse,

Grover Norquist, whose name I have never espied while within a voting booth, wants the U.S. government to return to the GDP levels of 1900, when the average lifespan of our citizens was 47. (There truly were no second acts in America then.) While that fact doesn’t suggest only causation–medical progress played a large part in the elongation of life–it can’t be reduced to mere correlation, either. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs have helped us live longer and better than humans ever have in our nation’s history.

GOP VP nominee Paul Ryan is also more in love with ideology and fudged math than human life, more beholden to ingrown, adolescent fantasies of rugged individualism. If his policies were ever enacted, really good people would die sooner than they have to. Talk about your death panels. In his latest column in the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier spits his considerable bile at a worthy target in Ryan, that Objectivist altar boy, dismantling his subject with reason and rage. An excerpt:

“‘I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.’ That is how John Galt concludes his testament, which Paul Ryan demands that his staffers in Congress read. What a frail sense of self it is that feels so imperiled by the existence of others! This monadic ideal is not heroic, it is cowardly. It is also dangerous, because it honors only itself. In his Roadmap, the intellectual on the Republican ticket lectures that “the Founders saw [Adam] Smith not only as an economic thinker, but as a moral philosopher whose other great work was The Theory of Moral Sentiments.’ Never mind that everybody else also saw Smith that way, because he really was a moral philosopher and he really did write The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Has Ryan ever opened The Theory of Moral Sentiments? Has he ever read its very first sentence on its very first page? ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed,’ Smith begins, ‘there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’ That is the least Galt-like, least Rand-like, least Ryan-like sentence ever written. And from there the conservatives’ deity launches into a profound analysis of ‘mutual sympathy.’ So much for Ryan’s fiction of the isolato with a platinum card! If there is anything that Adam Smith stands for, it is the reconcilability of capitalism with fellow feeling, of market economics with social decency. But Ryan is a dismal student of Smith, because he likes his capitalism cruel.”