Paul Ryan on Poverty

The media caricature of Paul Ryan is of a heartless Ayn Rand disciple, looking to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.  Whether the famed "Ryan Budget" is sufficiently compassionate and whether its projections are sound are matters for another day.  What I'd like to point out is that he apparently fought hard to make poverty and income mobility significant issues in the 2012 Romney-Ryan campaign, finally convincing the Romney people to let him do so in a speech at Cleveland State University on October 24.

Ryan's speech is approvingly summarized by David Azerrad in a post on the Heritage Foundations's Foundry blog.  As Azerrad notes, Ryan did not deny the enormous problems posed by poverty and the enormous obstacles that poor people face.  Instead, he laid out his aspiration that the American Dream be accessible to all children, no matter their backgrounds, and attempted to explain how conservative, smaller government makes that goal more achievable than the big government solutions that have failed us for 50 years. 

• Ryan on the big government approach: “With a few exceptions, government’s approach has been to spend lots of money on centralized, bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs. The mindset behind this approach is that a nation should measure compassion by the size of the federal government and how much it spends." 
• Ryan on his own approach: "Well, to hear some tell it, we think everybody should just fend for themselves. But that’s just a false argument—a straw man set up to avoid genuine debate.… I believe in true compassion and upward mobility.”
• He also made some interesting observations about civil society as a partial substitute for government.  Look for more blog posts on that theme in this space in the future.

The full text is here.  Video below:

Samuel Gregg, posting on National Review Online, was a fan, but the speech didn't win a lot of converts on the left.  In my view, those on the left refuse to engage the foundations of Ryan's arguments.  They assume that advocating smaller government programs is automatically heartless, and they focus on income inequality (and failure to redistribute) rather than socioeconomic mobility.  Of course Paul Ryan is heartless if the measure of heart is belief in big government programs.  But what if he's right that the war of poverty is already a proven failure?  Doesn't that require some reexamination of the traditional "war on poverty"?  At the very least, shouldn't his arguments be addressed rather than skirted?