Paul Ryan is today’s leading Republican intellectual because he’s read 4 books. Well 3, actually, but he read Atlas Shrugged twice.. Alec MacGillis has a thorough examination of this in The New Republic:
“It wasn’t clear at first that he even wanted to be in D.C. Offered a position on Senator Bob Kasten’s committee right after college, Ryan took awhile to respond because he was trying to find work as a ski instructor in Colorado instead.”
“Ryan was inquisitive during his early days on the Hill, but in a way that was hard to distinguish from mere favor-currying. (He had been named the ‘biggest brown noser’ of his high school class.) He nagged [Cesar] Conda … so often with questions about supply-side economics that Conda lent him two books to keep him busy—Jude Wanniski’s The Way the World Worksand George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty, both foundational tracts for trickle-down Reaganomics.”
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