Paul Ryan's WSJ Manifesto

House member Paul Ryan (R-WI) and AEI president Arthur C. Brooks co-authored an impressive editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled The Size of Government and the Choice This Fall.

Here are some of the most illuminating passages from their piece,

"In response to what each of us has written in the preceding months, we have heard again and again that the choice we pose is too stark. New York Times columnist David Brooks (no relation) finds our approach too Manichaean, and the Schumpeter columnist in The Economist objected that, "You can have a big state with a well-functioning free market."

Data support the proposition that Americans like generous government programs and don't want to lose them. So while 70% of Americans told pollsters at the Pew Research Center in 2009 they agreed that "people are better off in a free market economy, even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time," large majorities favor keeping our social insurance programs intact. This leads conventional thinkers to claim that a welfare state is what we truly want, regardless of whether or not we mouth platitudes about "freedom" and "entrepreneurship."

But these claims miss the point. What we must choose is our aspiration, not whether we want to zero out the state. Nobody wants to privatize the Army or take away Grandma's Social Security check. Even Friedrich Hayek in his famous book, "The Road to Serfdom," reminded us that the state has legitimate—and critical—functions, from rectifying market failures to securing some minimum standard of living.

This is made abundantly clear in surveys such as the one conducted by the Ayers-McHenry polling firm in 2009, which asked a large group of Americans, "Overall, would you prefer larger government with more services and higher taxes, or smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes?" To this question, 21% favored the former, while 69% preferred the latter.

Unfortunately, many political leaders from both parties in recent years have purposively obscured the fundamental choice we must make by focusing on individual spending issues and programs while ignoring the big picture of America's free enterprise culture. In this way, redistribution and statism always win out over limited government and private markets.

Why not lift the safety net a few rungs higher up the income ladder? Go ahead, slap a little tariff on some Chinese goods in the name of protecting a favored industry. More generous pensions for teachers? Hey, it's only a few million tax dollars—and think of the kids, after all.

Individually, these things might sound fine. Multiply them and add them all up, though, and you have a system that most Americans manifestly oppose—one that creates a crushing burden of debt and teaches our children and grandchildren that government is the solution to all our problems. Seventy percent of us want stronger free enterprise, but the other 30% keep moving us closer toward an unacceptably statist America—one acceptable government program at a time.

Millions of Americans instinctively look to our leaders for a defense of our culture of free enterprise. Instead, we get more and more publicly funded gewgaws and shiny government novelties to distract us. For example, the administration stills touts the success of programs such as "Cash for Clunkers" in handing out borrowed money to citizens while propping up a favored industry. Yet Rasmussen found 54% of Americans opposed the program (only 35% favored it). Plenty of people may have availed themselves of that notorious boondoggle, but a large majority understand we were basically just asking our children (who will have to pay the $3 billion back) to buy us new cars—and that's not right.

More and more Americans are catching on to the scam. Every day, more see that the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America's enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship."

There are several things to admire about this editorial.

First, Ryan and Brooks explicitly acknowledge some role for government in maintaining minimal social programs for economic safety nets. They dismiss the notion of arbitrarily dissolving existing social compacts unilaterally. But they do shine a bright spotlight on the process by which "smooth-talking politicians" rob us of liberty, one expensive program at a time.

Second, the authors note the continuing contradiction between the ever more-expensive welfare state that federal legislators are giving voters, and the voters' own preference for just the opposite.

Third, they make a very clear example of what folly programs like "Cash for Clunkers" was. They note that it simply borrowed money from foreigners, to be repaid by our children, so that some Americans could get a better deal on a car last year.

Looked at in the aggregate, recent creeping socialism by both parties in Washington is easily seen through the lens of Ryan's and Brooks' prose.

They are right to call this coming mid-term election a critically important one for voters. They can explicitly choose to remain on the path to socialism, or to stop and retrace the nation's steps toward a society of greater opportunity and freedom.