Pete Wehner admired Paul Ryan’s Heritage Foundation speech:

He made the case for why equality of outcome is itself a form of inequality (it creates a system based on political influence and bureaucratic favoritism). He made a moral defense of capitalism, pointing out that it has done far more to help the poor than any other economic system ever devised. And he made the (Lincolnian) case for upward mobility, for the idea that all citizens have the right to rise.

I suppose this would be a bad time to point out that the TARP that Ryan supported is a classic example of “a system based on political influence” that rewards failed companies and successful companies without regard to merit or outcome. Fortunately, Ryan is against all that now! Look, he has said so. He doesn’t like the “class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society.” He just votes for the latter’s bailouts and defends their interests, and occasionally writes lengthy articles in which he conflates those interests with a defense of the “free enterprise ethic.”

I’m not sure that asserting that everyone has a right to something is the same as making the case for it. When he said that Americans have “an upwardly mobile society with a lot of movement between income groups,” he was praising that arrangement. He did so largely by ignoring the decline in American social mobility that has been taking place in recent decades.