OK, so I just said it’s one of the establishment’s jobs to pretend the public has a real choice come election time. Here’s Princeton professor and establishment economist extraordinaire Alan Blinder:

“But with Messrs. Romney and Ryan, it’s out with Franklin Roosevelt and in with Ayn Rand.”

The University of Missouri’s Peter Klein responds:

This attempted bon mot illustrates the vapidity of American political and economic discourse. Paul Ryan says a few nice things about Ayn Rand, F. A. Hayek, and even Mises, and this makes him a devotee of “unfettered markets”! Blinder offers few specifics to illustrate Romney and Ryan’s deviations from the Rooseveltian consensus. He mentions the Ryan budget — that radical document proposing to slash federal spending from 22% of GDP to 20% of GDP, some $5 trillion of annual largesse, by 2040, which is practically tomorrow! A veritable John Galt, that Paul Ryan. And Blinder reminds us that Romney and Ryan have pledged to repeal Dodd-Frank, without which we would have a completely unfettered, unregulated, free-market banking sector. Get ready for dog-eat-dog! The list goes on — Romney and Ryan want the government to provide Medicare vouchers, rather than pay Medicare bills directly, which certainly sounds like a total free market in medicine to me.