Stephen Spruiell argues that Republican leaders should embrace Rep. Paul Ryan’s “roadmap.” I think they’re reacting to Ryan’s plan as they should be: praising it as an example of how free-market ideas can be applied to the nation’s challenges and using it to push back against the charge that Republicans have no interest in solving problems. But I do not think that Rep. Ryan’s plan should become the Republican plan for addressing health care, entitlements, and tax reform, because I don’t think that the appropriate response to overreaching liberal comprehensivism is overreaching conservative comprehensivism.

Many Republicans have complained that President Obama’s agenda is too ambitious: that it attempts to do too many things at once, indeed to transform America. Conservatives have said that health-care reform should take the form of modest steps that reduce our problems with cost, access, and portability rather than an attempt to have Congress rationalize the entire system. Rep. Ryan’s plan is the mirror image of Obama’s agenda. It attempts to move America in a free-market rather than social-democratic direction, and I support that goal; but it is just as transformational, just as ambitious, just as immodest. I don’t think that the public, or the political system, can bear this type of comprehensive change. Nor do I believe the public really wants our politicians to offer a complete 100-year solution to making entitlements solvent; I suspect it would need them to prove first that they are equipped to make headway against the problem before it would trust anything so sweeping.

Rep. Ryan’s plan is a great way to provide the conservative movement with long-term goals, but it is not a practical agenda for incremental progress, and that’s what conservatives need more urgently.

Update: Reihan Salam raises another concern about the roadmap: It may not achieve its advertised claim of eliminating the deficit.