Since Paul Ryan was announced as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, many progressives and even mainstream media outlets have noted that there's a fundamental tension between Ryan's belief system and his biography. Ryan is beloved by the conservative base because he is, by all accounts, a true believer, deeply influenced by the hyper-individualistic philosophy of romance novelist Ayn Rand. His speeches and talking points and the lengthy preamble to one of his first big budget documents paint a picture of a world divided into makers and takers, those who produce and those who mooch. To Rand, the ultimate good is freedom and all attempts to weave together a social safety net, to alleviate misery caused by misfortune are incursions on that freedom and thus suspect, even contemptible.
And for Ryan, there's a biographical dimension to this philosophy. Ryan suffered through a horrible tragedy in his teenage years when he discovered his father dead of a heart attack in his house. The death shook Ryan and he, says, changed his outlook. It changed the finances of the household: his mother went back to school and they took in his grandmother. Ryan says he concluded that "I've got to either sink or swim in life."
There's a deep existential sense in which that's true for everyone. As conscious, human agents we are all ultimately responsible for our own conduct and the choices we make. But that does not mean we sink or swim alone. In fact, it's almost never the case that we do. And this is where we start to see the deep tension between Ryan's philosophy and Ryan's biography. In Ryan's case, while there's no question the experience of his father's death must have been wrenching and devastating, Ryan and his family were not left to "sink or swim" on their own.... they availed themselves, as they should have, of various flotation devices which helped them not only to survive, but to thrive, preserving their freedoms, rather than diminishing them.
First there's the Social Security survivors check the government started sending the family upon his father's death, which would help pay for his college. There's also the family made well-off in part by government spending, that Ryan was lucky enough to be born into, one of the most prominent in his hometown of Janesville, owners of a large, successful construction company, which got its start in 1884 in railroad construction—which was heavily subsidized by the federal government. The company continued to prosper as it moved into the business of building roads... public roads. It's the same family company that would later hire Paul Ryan as a marketing consultant, giving his political resume a littlerivate sector experience burnish.
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