Since Wis­con­sin Sen­a­tor Paul Ryan may soon be only a heart­beat away from the pres­i­den­cy of the Unit­ed States, it might be good to pause for a moment and con­sid­er the man’s val­ues. In par­tic­u­lar, it might make sense to get acquaint­ed with his stat­ed source of moral inspi­ra­tion.

“The rea­son I got involved in pub­lic ser­vice,” Ryan said in 2005, “by and large, if I had to cred­it one thinker, one per­son, it would be Ayn Rand.”

The Russ­ian émi­gré writer and philoso­pher Ayn Rand believed that self-inter­est was the great­est good and that altru­ism was unspeak­ably wicked. “Altru­ism is a mon­strous notion,” she said in 1981. “It is the moral­i­ty of can­ni­bals devour­ing one anoth­er. It is a the­o­ry of pro­found hatred for man, for rea­son, for achieve­ment, for any form of human suc­cess and hap­pi­ness on earth.”

Ryan was deeply impressed when he first read Rand’s books as a young­ster. “I grew up read­ing Ayn Rand, and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my val­ue sys­tems are,” Rand told The Atlas Soci­ety in 2005. “It inspired me so much that it’s required read­ing in my office for all interns and my staff.”

Rand called the Unit­ed States a “nation of mon­ey,” and she meant it as a com­pli­ment. “The words ‘to make mon­ey’ hold the essence of human moral­i­ty,” she wrote in a famous pas­sage in her 1957 nov­el, Atlas Shrugged. In Rand’s hier­ar­chy of virtue the Amer­i­can indus­tri­al­ist is “the high­est type of human being” and the needy are rab­ble. “Par­a­sites, moochers, loot­ers, brutes and thugs can be of no val­ue to a human being,” Rand wrote in 1963. “Nor can he gain any ben­e­fit from liv­ing in a soci­ety geared to their needs, demands and pro­tec­tion, a soci­ety that treats him as a sac­ri­fi­cial ani­mal and penal­izes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a soci­ety based on the ethics of altru­ism.”

If Rand taught Ryan “quite a bit” about who he is and what his val­ue sys­tems are, then per­haps Rand’s state­ment above should tell us some­thing about Ryan’s cur­rent bud­get pro­pos­al, which would slash $3.3 tril­lion from pro­grams for low-income earn­ers over the next decade while pro­vid­ing a wind­fall for the wealthy in the form of tax cuts that would net an aver­age $265,000 a year for those with incomes greater than $1 million–over and above the $129,000 they would already receive from Ryan’s exten­sion of the Bush tax cuts. In Ryan’s bud­get the rich are released from their unjust bur­den as “sac­ri­fi­cial ani­mals” while the “par­a­sites,” “moochers” and “looters”–i.e. the elder­ly, the dis­abled and the poor–are taught a les­son in virtue.

For a quick primer on Rand’s philosophy–straight from the horse’s mouth–watch her 1967 appear­ance (above) on The Tonight Show Star­ring John­ny Car­son.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Col­bert on Ayn Rand

Mike Wal­lace Inter­views Ayn Rand (1959)

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged