Will Wilkinson has offered some unsolicited advice to Rep. Paul Ryan that contrasts with my own take. As always, Will makes a compelling case:

Because I am so sympathetic to Mr Ryan’s general approach to policy, I would like to see him adopt a rhetorical approach that will not alienate millions of voters who might otherwise seriously entertain his worthy proposals. I stand with Mr Ryan in his opposition to a state in which “government assumes greater control of more sectors of the economy and more aspects of our lives.” However, it’s a confusing, self-undermining mistake to characterise the fight against encroaching corporatism and paternalism as a fight against “an expanding social welfare state”. To many Americans, this comes across as animosity to the welfare state as such, which creates suspicion that Mr Ryan’s reform proposals aim to gut rather than reinforce the protections offered by the welfare state. But, as Mr Ryan himself emphasises, what he actually proposes are reforms that would strengthen the American welfare/social-insurance state by putting it on more sustainable footing. [Emphasis added.]

Will is wading in a debate that has been dividing libertarians for years, and indeed Rep. Ryan has explicitly described himself as a “classical liberal,” one reason why he uses the term “progressive” to describe the American left.

My problem with Mr Ryan’s rhetorical strategy is rooted in a problem with his first principles. As far as I can tell, Mr Ryan’s first principles don’t actually support the kind of government he proposes to modernise. First principles (such as Ayn Rand’s) that amount to a radical critique of the liberal-democratic welfare state are a pretty poor foundation for a practical approach to the government of the liberal-democratic welfare state. Mr Ryan would do much better with first principles capable of delivering an integrated approach to liberty, opportunity, and social insurance, though I don’t expect he’ll start seeing things my way any time soon. In any case, he would be more effective if instead of insisting that “we must decide”—that it’s us or it’s them—Mr Ryan were to acknowledge that we will never reach anything approaching consensus on first principles, and that he therefore offers his impressive package of bright policy ideas as part of a good-faith effort to find reasonable compromise and reach mutual accommodation between persistently conflicting visions of political justice.

To me, this is a more effective rhetorical tack than Brink Lindsey’s approach in his review essay on The Battle, though of course the critiques are closely related.

And yet I still think “the vision thing” is important. Rather than abandon his vision of an opportunity society, I’d recommend that Rep. Ryan place more emphasis on “dynamism” and less on the language of natural rights and the road to serfdom. Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies was an attempt to draw on Hayekian insights in a democratic world in which, as Hayek understood in his later years, had moved beyond debates over central planning. From a synopsis of the book, which I regret to report is not available for the Kindle:

Dynamists are united not by a single political agenda but by an appreciation for such complex evolutionary processes as scientific inquiry, market competition, artistic development, and technological invention. Entrepreneurs and artists, scientists and legal theorists, cultural analysts and computer programmers, dynamists are, says Postrel, “the party of life.”

This is a vision of a creative, decentralized, and prosperous society that resonates with Rep. Ryan’s approach to government, yet that lacks the hard edge of culture war politics.