Mark Ames: Paul Ryan’s Guru Ayn Rand Worshipped a Serial Killer Who Kidnapped and Dismembered Little Girls

Ayn Rand (born Alisa Rosenbaum) was an all around awful human being. And the people who fetishize her and her objectionable Objectivist philosophy (cough Paul Ryan cough cough Alan Greenspan) are at their cores truly horrible people. 

But all that said, even I was not prepared to learn the depths of her depraved thinking. 

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Mark Ames: Paul Ryan's Guru Ayn Rand Worshipped a Serial Killer Who Kidnapped and Dismembered Little Girls

Yves here. There is one way that Mark Ames' underlying post needs a smidge of updating. Sadly, the technocratic elites in Europe are now firmly trying to inflict bone-crushing austerity on ordinary workers, despite visible evidence of its failure (debt to GDP ratios keep rising as the economies contract) and widespread public opposition. There the rationale is a bizarre combination of "punish the borrowers" when countries like Ireland and Spain were held up as poster children of economic success until the bust, and a need to hide the fact that what looks like rescues of the PIIGS is in fact bailouts of French and German banks.

By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine. Cross posted from The eXiled

To celebrate today's announcement that Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan will in a few months' time be a heartbeat from the presidency—and to honor this special moment, marking the final syphilitic pus-spasms of America's decline and fall–we are reposting for your edification Mark Ames' 2010 article about the man behind the Rand: Ayn Rand's unrequited adoration of a notorious serial killer, William Edward Hickman. Yes, Vice President-to-be Paul Ryan owes his entire "moral" worldview to a lowly groupie of serial killers, a 1920′s prototype of today's "Joker" wannabees. Yes folks, in a few months' time Americans will finally be able to stand up and declare: "We are all serial-killer groupies now."

There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people go frothing batshit angry at the suggestion that maybe health care coverage should be extended to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it; or when they froth at the mouth in ecstasy at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of their population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who plays ...

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