Sure, Ryan is good at presenting charts and figures on the budget and Social Security. These charts and figures are cute, but charts do not make one a principled, free-market intellectual. Your voting record does, and Ryan's isn't pretty.
With Romney and Ryan, I'm afraid of the following scenario: The media labels them the "champions of the free market," and then they win the election. After getting into office, the two repeat the same old Republican pattern of spending on wars and their own social pet projects. After four years, the country is in worse shape, and people ask themselves, "Hey, things are even worse now. Whose fault is it? Must be those free-marketeers Romney and Ryan, who've been running the country for the past few years. Let's vote them out for some good old socialism again."
If the average Joe is trained to think that capitalism gets the same result as socialism, why vote for free-market policies?
It is a fair criticism of Republicans that they didn't control spending last time around.
Yet, I don't see the connection between Ryan's votes at those times and his current position -- everyone pretty much agrees that Ryan's proposal is serious and that he acknowledges errors of the past. And when many of those votes were taken, he was not exactly in a position of power.
The question to me is who do we think will be more likely to control the growth in government -- R&R or Obama. Obama makes no real pretense about it -- if he is re-elected he will do everything he can to expand government in every conceivable direction. |
