In a speech on 31 March 2010, Republican congressman Paul Ryan outlined his idea of America by asking:
Should America bid farewell to exceptional freedom and follow the retreat to European social welfare paternalism ... or should we make a new start, in the faith that boundless opportunities belong to the workers, the builders, the industrious, and the free?
It’s captivating rhetoric, but it's wrong.
Paul Ryan is wrong because he doesn’t understand freedom.
Ryan’s conservatism makes limited government the entirety of freedom. In this view only the government can oppress, and Godhas already handed down the scientific formula: "As government expands, liberty contracts." But the Gipper—and Paul Ryan—are wrong, because the government is not the only threat to our liberty, and in fact can be a safeguard against other threats.
Paul Ryan is wrong because freedom is worthless without the ability to exercise it. It doesn’t help me at all that there is no law against breathing underwater; I still can’t do it. Freedom is hollow unless people are empowered to use it. The right to counsel in a criminal trial is important, but poverty made that freedom worthless to the poor until Gideon v. Wainwright made that legal right a reality. Many right-libertarians still oppose the public accommodations laws that banned whites-only businesses, because they do not see that private bigotry can strip away freedom as effectively as a tyrannical government.
Your freedom of action is restricted just as much by material circumstance as by government regulation and taxation. A free society to me is one in which everyone has a good and equal opportunity to make full use of their talents and to pursue their dreams. One part of that is limited government: I fully agree with Paul Ryan that freedom is imperiled if the state decides your occupation or arbitrarily seizes your property. But a truly free choice of occupations is unattainable in a world of crushing student debt. You cannot follow your dreams if you are dying of a treatable illness.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." --Anatole France
That’s why it’s laughable when conservatives claim to believe in "equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome." I don’t know of anyone who truly believes in equality of outcome, and I'm friends with communists. I believe in an equality of opportunity: society should be structured so that innate ability and motivation are the only determinants of success. Equal opportunity means that everyone should have free access to excellent public schools, no matter where they live, including occupational training and postsecondary education. Equal opportunity demands that people have access to free or inexpensive healthcare, because cancer is not meritocratic. Equal opportunity requires that everyone has a place to live in a safe, clean environment. A society of equal opportunity is one in which any competent, intelligent, ethical person could actually be President when they grow up.
Representative Ryan references the Founders of our nation, who "launched mankind’s noblest experiment in human freedom." He explains, of course, how the Founders favored his political ideology:
The truths of the American founding can't become obsolete because they are not timebound. They are eternal. The practical consequences of these truths is free labor and free enterprise under government by popular consent.
People who idolize the Founders too often ignore how some of America’s greatest triumphs come when we do things that would make most of the Founders recoil. Interestingly, Paul Ryan praises many of these very "mobocratic" victories:
Early Progressives wanted to empower and engage the people. They fought for populist reforms like initiative and referendum, recalls, judicial elections, and the breakup of monopoly corporations, and the elimination of vote buying and urban patronage.
Ryan believes thinks that the democratic process should be clean, fair, and open to everyone. He understands that the creation of America did not end in 1789, but is an eternal struggle to create a more perfect union. He also apparently believes that the system should be as ineffective as possible when it comes to promoting economic fairness.
Paul Ryan is wrong because he does not understand that freedom is more than limited government or even equality before the law. Promoting equal opportunity is not "paternalism", but freedom in the full sense of the word.