Reid on Ryan on Rand

My colleague Chuck Reid has a short essay on the Huffington Post raising questions about the tensions between Catholic social teaching and Paul Ryan's embrace of Ayn Rand.  An excerpt:

Ayn Rand, to her great credit, rejected racism emphatically. But she celebrated much of the rest of the social darwinist creed. There is no room in her work for cooperation, for community, for concern for the less advantaged. The maximization of individual productive capacity, freed of the impediments of state control, is the byword of her philosophy, so-called "Objectivism." The noble entrepreneur, the far-sighted man of wealth and power, the bold individualist who casts off the shackles of the "takers" and the "hangers-on," is the hero of her fiction. Without him, society itself would crumble to dust.

These philosophical premises, of course, stand in contradiction to the social thought of the Catholic Church, as developed over two millenia of experience. Paul Ryan surely knows this. His tepid protest that he reads the Bible and so cannot be a follower of Ayn Rand rings hollow. The record of his public life is that of a man in thrall to a curdled, warped individualism. I, for one, would like to know what he thinks about the magisterium of the Church regarding the positive value of the state.