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Wealth & Poverty Review Ryan isn’t a Randian

Jay W. Richards
April 16, 2012


An urban legend on the left is that Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan is a big fan of Ayn Rand, and requires his staff to read Atlas Shrugged. It’s not true. I confirmed this with a Ryan staff member a year ago. But the story fits so well with the leftwing narrative that it refuses to die. Brian Bolduc dismantles the charge well in National Review Online.
In reality, Ryan is a Catholic who understands his work in light of Catholic Social Teaching. Of course, this is a prudential judgment on which Catholics may agree or disagree. But in any case, the “Ryan is a Randian” meme should be challenged wherever it crops up.

Jay W. Richards

Senior Fellow at Discovery, Senior Research Fellow at Heritage Foundation
Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is the Director of the DeVos Center and William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute, and Editor-at-Large of The Stream. Richards is author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated (2013) and Indivisible (2012); The Human Advantage; Money, Greed, and God, winner of a 2010 Templeton Enterprise Award; The Hobbit Party with Jonathan Witt; The Privileged Planet with Guillermo Gonzalez, coming out in a second edition in 2024; The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic Into a Catastrophe with Douglas Axe and William Briggs; and Eat, Fast, Feast. His most recent book, with James Robison, is Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War.