A breed that no longer exists, and two men who were the real thing
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Jonathan Hare describes his own former politics precisely: a fiscally responsible Reagan Republican of the purist wing — a description he attaches to a breed he says no longer exists.
He raises it not as affiliation but as calibration. Someone who has held a position honestly can describe what its serious version looked like, and can distinguish it from what now carries the same name.
The relationships behind it are closer than the earlier version of this page implied. Paul Ryan and Pat Toomey were both housemates — renting rooms in Jim Woodhill's house on Capitol Hill, where Hare stayed whenever he was in Washington.
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The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
He tried to explain the distinction to Pat Toomey once, after Toomey had left the House and was running the Club for Growth — then the premier home of that purist wing. They were housemates at the time; both Toomey and Paul Ryan rented rooms in the same house on Capitol Hill.
His reading of the two men, recorded as his opinion: Paul Ryan, later Speaker and at that point chairman of the Budget Committee, was the true fiscal conservative of the pair. Toomey was more of a supply-sider — but an evidence-based one, in favor of cutting taxes in ways that actually increased growth and revenue.
As distinct, in Hare's formulation, from cutting them to line the pockets of donors who inherited their money, or of people exploiting the capitalist system in one way or another.
That distinction — between a policy designed to grow the base and one designed to transfer from it — is the same distinction this record makes everywhere between adding value and extracting it.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Remove the informational rent and the crime has nothing to steal
Open →the wider patternEveryone's mathematics, everyone's law — and no culture's alone
Open →housemateHousemate, chairman of the Budget Committee, later Speaker
Open →housemateHousemate, Club for Growth, then Senator
Open →where it was arguedWhere Hare's job was to evict the future Speaker of the House
Open →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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