“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” Ryan has listed Rand’s manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, as one of his three most often reread books, and in 2003, he told The Weekly Standard he tries to make his interns read it. Rand is a useful touchstone to understand Ryan’s public philosophy. She centered libertarian philosophy around a defense of capitalism in general and, in particular, a conception of politics as a class war pitting virtuous producers against parasites who illegitimately use the power of the state to seize their wealth. Ludwig von Mises, whom Ryan has also cited as an influence, once summed up Rand’s philosophy in a letter to her: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: You are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.”

Take last month’s poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, for example. It asked about a plan which, like Mr. Ryan’s, would change Medicare to a system of private insurance plans, with the government providing a voucher toward the purchase of care. Initially, support for the plan split about evenly, with 46 percent preferring the changes and 50 percent preferring to keep Medicare as it is. That’s not such a bad result for Republicans.
The problem is what happened when Kaiser read different arguments about the plan, arguments which resemble those which voters will hear over the next 18 months. To the 50 percent who were opposed to the plan originally, Kaiser recited a series of arguments that resemble those that Mr. Ryan himself is making: That the plan would reduce the deficit, that the plan would increase choice and that it would save Medicare from fiscal insolvency. Some respondents, 17 percent of those who were originally opposed to the plan, changed their mind after hearing these arguments.
Meanwhile, to the voters who originally supported the plan, Kaiser read another set of arguments, those which resemble the ones that Democrats are making. They said that the plan would increase health care costs and reduce benefits, would do too much to empower private insurance companies, and would “eliminate traditional Medicare.” Upon hearing these arguments, 42 percent of voters who originally supported the plans changed their minds and said they were no longer in favor of it.
Democrats, in other words, seem to have the more persuasive side of the argument — their case was more than twice as likely to change a voter’s mind

bbauska wrote:It will be a battle between those who want something done about the deficit and those who don't.