Ryan's Reason

Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan wrote a thoughtful piece in The American Spectator on the broader implications of the healthcare debate. Drawing on the thought Blackstone and Tocqueville, Ryan underscores the dangers involved in trading off individual liberty and civic virtues in favor of expanded entitlements.

A very short description of the American character would be: this ensemble of moral qualities that make it possible for persons to live under self-restraint, without dependency, in personal relationships with others in community under God.

As Tocqueville discerned in Democracy In America, a human being who fails to practice these fundamental habits, especially the key virtue of practical wisdom, will gradually lose the ability to sustain basic human qualities and sentiments. Lacking the habit of making prudent decisions every day about one's well-being and learning to accept the consequences of those decisions, one becomes a victim of necessity, passively serving unaccountable rulers who take it on themselves to define and satisfy the victims' needs, desires, and pleasures. Tocqueville's chief worry was something he described as a new kind of despotism. In generations to come, many citizens in democratic nations might be tempted to trade their liberty, which demands risk-taking, hard work, and self-restraint, for the easy security and benefits a "soft despotism" would bring. Tocqueville saw the path to this gray future in the growing centralization of government which had been at work in Europe for centuries. America's Founders, for their part, risked their whole experiment in free market democracy on preserving the character of citizens in order to resist every such design to turn Americans into European-style servants of the government.