Saving Public Ryan

This is one of those mornings when you wake up with a great title and then need a blog entry to fit the title. Sometimes the material is lacking. Other times, the material is there, and you are lacking.

I've spent the morning reading pundits from the far left to the far right, gathering a lot of heat and a little light about Paul Ryan. Alternatively, he's proof that small-government Conservatives have captured the GOP; he's proof that Romney is desperate; he's proof that Romney is a self-assured, mature candidate, who made his choice in naming a running mate who reflects his true ideology; he is the best hope of the Democratic Party; he's the hope of the GOP, because he will deliver Wisconsin; he's the second VP candidate in a row chosen by Bill Kristol; he's the most relevant indicator of from where Romney will govern; he's utterly irrelevant, because the only relevant VP in the last hundred years was Dick Cheney, and he's no Dick Cheney; he's amazingly relevant because Romney is just as weak as George W. Bush was on policy and ideology, and like Cheney, Ryan is strong on policy and ideology.

I have no idea what the candidacy of Paul Ryan means. I only know what I want it to mean. I want it to mean to voters that they have the right and responsibility to make him relevant. The public has a choice to believe what candidates say, and hold them to it. When Paul Ryan spends more than a decade doing his damnedest to dismantle social programs, believe that he will go further if elected. When Paul Ryan votes against every single environmentalist initiative, believe that he will go further if elected to the Executive Branch. When Paul Ryan promises to privatize Social Security and Medicare, not just as an accounting trick, but because he believes the private sector will do it better, believe him. First read, "Too Big To Fail," "Liars Poker," and "No One Would Listen," and then place your medical treatment options if old or disabled, as well as your nest-egg, in the hands of an unregulated private sector. Paul Ryan has spent his forty-two years on this Earth struggling to be ever more relevant to you. Let him win: Make him relevant, and believe, against all cynicism, that he will do what he promises to do.

I often feel that we have left the Enlightenment in America, and re-entered the Era of Belief. Rather than learn from even recent history, many of us simply choose to believe in all manner of stuff. I have a friend on Facebook who wakes up every morning, and republishes every right-wing editorial in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, ostensibly as a patriotic act. Forget, for a moment, that the latter is owned by a mad Korean cleric who presides over arranged mass-marriages of his acolytes and has been convicted of tax fraud. Forget that the former is owned by an Australian plutocrat whose entire news empire has been tainted irreversibly by ethical lapses that border on the absurd. Her belief is that our Founding Fathers find modern expression through the pens of people who owe more to Hayek than Hobbes, and more to Pat Buchanan than John Stuart Mill. Me, I take my lessons about limited government, checks and balances, and civic responsibility from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. I tend to avoid investment advice from them, however. Their knowledge of credit-default swaps and derivatives was sorely lacking. They did feed their slaves adequately, though. Soon we'll find out from a WSJ Editorial that their slaves had longer life expectancies than freeholders, so therefore slavery was a benefit that our hallowed Founding Fathers conferred on them.

But back to belief. Paul Ryan's raison d'etre for government service was a coded message from Ayn Rand. Mitt Romney's was a coded message from the Angel Moroni, and a fierce commitment to win the Office his father lost, perhaps because he as a bit too genuine and too honest about who he was back in 1968. George Romney's unguarded moment conceded to brainwashing on Vietnam, by Generals and Congressmen. From that uncoded message,  a young Mitt drew the lesson that he should simultaneously vigorously and publically campaign for the war, and seek a deferment through his ministry as a missionary in France. His heroic attempts to win converts in France failed, so he returned to America, infused with the new gospel of venture capital. I have no doubt that Barack Obama received a few coded messages from his late father and his Minister of many years, but he seems to have ignored those messasges assiduously in favor of those of John Maynard Keynes and two Roosevelts.

Ayn Rand wrote fiction, and as we've learned from Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, fiction is a poor foundation for government. Adam Smith's, "The Wealth of Nations,." although a work of non-fiction, is only slightly better as a foundation for government, because it wasn't meant to be about government, after all, it was meant to be about money. I'm not sure what to make of "The Road to Serfdom," quite frankly: I'll call it an exercise in  Truthiness, neither fact, nor fiction.

In the end, both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are united in belief. It is their belief that government and money are as one. It's a balance sheet, and all policy is just an entry on a balance sheet. If you can show a profit to your shareholders, then  you have succeeded. We are all equal shareholders; but in Romney and Ryan's world. . . . some shareholders are more equal than others. After the safety net is dismantled, "we'll think of something," perhaps in one of Mitt's "quiet rooms," where serious people discuss issues too serious for the unserious public to witness or participate, apparently.

In the next three months, Paul Ryan will be marketed to the public as an affable, intellectual, serious thinker with a compelling personal story. He is none of those things. He has a BA in Economics, with no post-graduate studies. He has less formal learning in Economics than I do, which is pathetic for a man who is claimed to be the intellectual leader of the economic wing of his Party. He has never worked outside of a summer job in the Private Sector (consultant to his family business for two years? Give me a break.). The lesson he took from investing his Social Security Survivor Benefits in a private college education was that Social Security would work better through privatization, a lesson he doubled down on after the entire financial sector crashed during his watch in Congress.

Public Ryan is a handsome, steely-eyed ideologue, a poster-child for Belief, over Experience. Experience would restore Glass-Steagall, roll back institutions too big to fail, overhaul the SEC, FTC, and other market watchdogs to efficiently regulate our markets. The forces of Belief revise history to tell us Roosevelt was wrong (hell, both of them!), Cheney was right (If only I had invested my FICA with Bernard Madoff instead of the Federal Government, I'd be set for old age) and the next coming boom will raise all boats, if only we let the bubble inflate.

The media will spend the next three months Saving Public Ryan. He's attractive, glib, specific, and new, unlike his running mate. Me, I hope he does well as a private citizen.