Amidst the current hubbub over budgets, spending and deficits, 2 names have come center stage this past year unfamiliar to most Americans- Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand. Ryan is the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, who has proposed the repeal of President Obama's Health Care Reform Bill, scrapping Medicare and Medicaid in 10 years, replacing them with a semi-privatized system of block grants to states and subsidies to insurance companies, essentially forcing seniors and low income parents to buy health insurance in a voucher like system on the private market, and also proposing to cut the top rate for Federal taxes from 35% to 25%. Ryan's proposals on Medicare and Medicaid have been blocked in the Senate and may never see the light of day again, but we all know how prominent his other ideas will be pending events in November. Without engaging in an in-depth critique of the rest of Ryan's proposals, it costs little time to point out that we already pay twice as much per person for health care as any other industrialized nation, or that income tax rates for Americans in that upper bracket are at their lowest in 18 years. Reforms in Medicare and Medicaid are needed and coming regardless. What is truly fascinating is the source of these radical proposals by Ryan, which brings me to Ayn Rand.

Does that name ring a bell? That fellow who wrote those 007 novels perhaps, or something to do with maps? Maybe the "latest flavor of the month" in Hollywood. Wrong on all counts. SHE was the Russian-American writer and libertarian who penned 2 weighty novels- "The Fountainhead" (1943) and "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) which she blatantly used to push her own particular philosophy, a dubious use of the novel form, though she was hardly the first to do so.

This philosophy, called Objectivism, holds that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral and any other method of distributing it immoral.The central struggle of politics should be to free successful people from having the fruits of their natural superiority redistributed to the undeserving who didn't earn it, namely, the rest of us. She wished to liberate the rich from the burden of responsibility for the welfare of fellow citizens. The rich were better than the rest of us by virtue of superior intellect and effort. She celebrated the individual and renounced the collective, implying we should be grateful to have them rule over us.

Her theory might be called trickle down in extreme, except the principal behind trickle down economics is that making the rich richer makes the poor richer- a rising tide lifts all boats, but reading Rand you never get the impression she's interested in anything trickling down to anybody. Rather she seems to hold the great mass of humanity just a little above contempt.

Rand was an avowed atheist. Objectivism practically makes a virtue of greed and selfishness. She called charity "not a moral duty" and "not a major virtue." Not much room for religion there. A Sermon on the Mount from Ayn Rand might read "Blessed are the wealthy, for their wants are many and righteous, and their worthiness far exceeds thine own."

So what has all this to do with Paul Ryan? It just so happens that the Congressman is an Ayn Rand nut. He is obsessed with all things Ayn Rand, a true believer in Objectivism, the superiority of the wealthy and privileged. "Atlas Shrugged" is required reading for every member of his staff. Ryan said that Rand is the reason he got into politics.

I fall to reminiscing about how logical I found the absolutist arguments of Barry Goldwater in "Conscience of a Conservative" when I read the book at 13. By the time I reached my mid-teens I'd spotted the holes and flaws. I guess we all grow up at different speeds.

Yes, I know some 50 million Americans presently have no health care coverage if you count all those homeless "non-persons" who don't get counted. Another 50 million have inadequate health care coverage- if they ever had to use it. Nobody denies the rich have gotten richer, the poor poorer, and the middle class has been slipping backwards over the past 30 years. So maybe we've been entering an Ayn Rand designed society all along and Paul Ryan is only putting an exclamation point on it.

I see things differently. Many critics label Rand's philosophy inverted Marxism, an enshrinement of the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." Paul Ryan and his ilk seem hell-bent on a revolution to deliver it. Now if it hadn't been for a small band of aggressive, well-organized zealots led by a man named Lenin a century ago, Karl Marx might have remained an obscure theoretician, ignored and buried in the history books. Likewise Ayn Rand, until now. Paul Ryan is to Rand, what Lenin was to Karl Marx. Remember how that turned out?