Madison's Sorrow by Kevin O'Leary

Author:Kevin O'Leary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Growing up in Houston, Ted Cruz had two formative influences in his life. One was the fierce anti-communism of his father, Rafael, who fought alongside Castro’s revolutionaries against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista only to see Castro become a full-fledged Communist. The other was the time spent as a teenager with the Free Market Education Foundation, an after-school program designed to instill free-market values in young people; here, he read and gave speeches about the radical libertarian economists—Hayek, Mises, and Friedman. In a spinoff group, the Constitutional Corroborators, the young Cruz learned to read the Constitution in a literal, originalist way.62 A Supreme Court clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Cruz holds constitutional views that complement his antigovernment, free-market rhetoric. Walter Dellinger, the former acting solicitor general in the Clinton Administration, says, “The only problem is that Ted’s view of the Constitution—based on states’ rights and a narrow scope of federal power—was rejected at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and then was resurrected by John C. Calhoun, and the Confederates during the Civil War, when it failed again.”63 In the 2016 Republican nomination contest, Cruz won nearly 700 delegates and defeated Donald Trump in a number of states, something no other GOP candidate did. Widely disliked in Washington, D.C., Cruz correctly anticipated the rightward tilt of the Republican Party in 2016.64 Positioned further to the right than Barry Goldwater, Cruz is a true believer, a zealot on a crusade, and an apostle of Hayek and Friedman.65 He appears to accept Friedman’s premise that only public safety, national defense, and the courts are “legitimate functions” of the federal government.66

Ryan—former House Speaker and Mitt Romney’s 2012 vice-presidential running mate—has a longstanding love affair with Rand’s ideas and, in turn, with Nietzsche’s dark philosophy.67 In 2005, the congressman spoke to a “Celebration of Ayn Rand” event and said, “I grew up reading Ayn Rand” and she “inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged … we go to Fountainhead, but then we move on, and we require Mises and Hayek as well.” Ryan continued:

“But 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. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight for individualism versus collectivism … you can’t find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism than Ayn Rand.”68

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