The Paul Ryan vision

CNBC’s Larry Kudlow on Representative Paul Ryan (read the whole thing):

Nevertheless, the Republican budget leader is an eternal optimist. He believes “there is a shift to the right” in the country, “toward free-market approval.” He sees evidence that “We are winning this debate.” He says, “The country will not accept a permanent class of technocrats that will diminish freedom, enhance crony capitalism, and allow the economy to enter some sort of managed decline.” Ryan talks about “reclaiming founding principles,” and about “fighting paternalistic, arrogant, and condescending government elites who want to equalize outcomes, create new entitlement rights, and promote less self-government by the citizenry.”

In other words, Rep. Paul Ryan is offering a completely different vision than the one Obama outlined in his Osawatomie, Kansas, campaign speech in early December. Ryan wants “the right to rise,” not a third wave of liberal progressivism. He wants to stop Obama’s attempt to add to the New Deal/Great Society with the statist universal-health-care program called Obamacare and an effective nationalization of the energy and financial sectors. And he completely rejects Obama’s divisive, big-government, punish-wealth, tax-the-rich leftist populism.

“A ruling system of big business, big government, and big-government unions does violence to the notion of entrepreneurial capitalism,” Ryan told me. “Whether it’s TARP, Fannie or Freddie, cap-and-trade, or Obamacare, this must be stopped.” Ryan stands against what he calls “the moral endgame to equalize outcomes.” He says: “No consolidation of power into a permanent political class. Equality of opportunity, not result.”

Exactly.