(hat tip to ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser)
Imagine the young Paul Ryan, back in his college days at the University of Miami (In Ohio) at a keg party, drinking beer. He’s not thinking about sex, or sports, or his college courses. He’s dreaming, wistfully, of someday ruining the lives of millions of poor Americans by taking away their health care.
Here’s what Ryan told the National Review’s Rich Lowry last Friday:
“So Medicaid, sending it back to the states, capping its growth rate. We’ve been dreaming of this since I’ve been around — since you and I were drinking at a keg. . . . I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a long time. We’re on the cusp of doing something we’ve long believed in.”
As Thinkprogress’ Ian Millhiser sardonically observes,
“Ryan is 47 years old, which means that, if he started “drinking at a keg” early in his college career, he’s fantasized about all the poor people who could be stripped of health care for nearly three decades.”
Ryan is a libertarian true believer, whose basic ideological precepts were shaped by Ayn Rand novels. Thus, he is opposed to any redistributive function of government whatsoever and thinks most of the current functions of federal and state government can be, and should be, privatized. Presumably for that reason, Ryan has inner-sanctum ties to the Koch brothers.
Another longtime dream of Ryan’s is the elimination of Social Security. Ryan’s inspiration for that derives from privatization under the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet who, besides his “shock doctrine” economic policies, also created a brutal gulag-like secret detention system that tortured somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Chileans. Thousands more just “disappeared”. As I wrote back in 2012,
The conceptual basis of Ryan’s Social Security privatization approach was hatched as the Piñera plan that was implemented under the radical right-wing Chilean torture regime of 1973 military coup leader Augusto Pinochet.
The Pinochet regime honed many of the techniques later used at the Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, was known to dispose of its unwanted citizens by throwing them out helicopters into the sea, and ran a transnational terrorism syndicate that murdered thousands and has been accused of a 1976 car bombing assassination in Washington D.C.
(...)
...in over 1,000 secret detention facilities across the country, tens of thousands of men, women, and children (by some scholarly estimates between 1.5 and 3 percent of Chile’s population) were subjected by authorities to brutal beatings, sexual abuses (sometimes involving animals), electroshock, psychological torture, and even medical torture, in a pattern that foreshadowed abuses at the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib, in Iraq. It was especially hard on women; years later, a governmental commission would report that female prisoners were routinely, repeatedly, raped*.
The Piñera plan was actually a flop, as my story describes. By 2006, by popular demand, Chile’s pension system was partially re-socialized to add subsidies for the poor.
Not that Paul Ryan noticed.
