A good summary of Ryanism from Politico:
When he was sixteen, he came home one night to find his father dead in bed, the victim of a heart attack. Then his grandmother — who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s — moved in with the Ryans. Young Paul underwent his own form of epiphany “I was, like, ‘What is the meaning?’ ” he said. “I just did lots of reading, lots of introspection. I read everything I could get my hands on.” He told The New Yorker that this included Ayn Rand — and after he read “Atlas Shrugged,” “I said, ‘Wow, I’ve got to check out this economics thing.’ What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government.”