Atlas Shrugged, Jesus Didn’t

Isaiah J. Poole writes:

Just in time for Easter, the movie version of “Atlas Shrugged” is poised to be shown in an expanding number of theaters. And, as Ayn Rand would be the first to admit, you could not set up a sharper clash of world views.

There is Jesus Christ, who, the apostle Paul writes, “died for the ungodly.” Then there is the atheist Rand—”by all accounts … one of the central intellectual and cultural inspirations for the base of the Republican Party,” Think Progress writes this week—who once told Alvin Toffler in a Playboy magazine interview that “nothing could make me more indignant” than the idea of a “man of perfect virtue” dying for the ungodly, “the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal.”

Rand is very clear: walking in the path of Christ and walking in the path of “Atlas Shrugged” hero John Galt will take you to two very different places. Which ought to give pause to political leaders who claim to embrace the values of Christ but adopt the politics of Rand.

Before Congress went on its Easter recess, the House of Representatives passed a 2012 federal budget blueprint drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who credits Rand for inspiring him into entering politics, and who reportedly encourages his staff members to read “Atlas Shrugged.” The budget unabashedly bears the trademarks of Rand’s thinking: its glorification of individualism and private enterprise not as a companion to the collective pursuit of the common good but as a replacement for it; the gradual elimination of anything that compels the haves to share with the have-nots; the presumption that have-nots are “moochers” or “looters” and must be treated accordingly.

It is this view of how America should work that is at the root of such schemes as turning Medicare into weakly subsidized private insurance, shifting increasing health care costs onto seniors as well as the burden of negotiating a predatory insurance market.

Shades of Rand are also present in a speech Ryan gave on the House floor March 2010 in opposition to the health care reform bill. In that speech, Ryan turns the question about how the nation should make health care affordable and accessible for all people into issues of “rights” and false choices.

“Our founding fathers got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights are derived from nature and nature’s God, not from government.