Rand Paul is stupid. Or, at least, he is not very bright. I say that not because I disagree with him politically, but because he regularly says stupid things. Stupid things that he thinks are very clever. (Also, he seems pretty ignorant of the history of the state he was elected to represent and the powers of a senator, but ignorance is different from dumbness.)
So considering his history of smugly saying stupid things, no one should be surprised that Sen. Paul said this:
With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction. I'm a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.
[...]
I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.
Offensive, insulting, infused with the self-pitying victimology of the very privileged, and so self-evidently dumb that a college freshman who just discovered Ayn Rand would be embarrassed to have said it. It's a Rand Paul argument, all right! Why are you trying to enslave Rand Paul, by having the government offer him money to treat people? That is literally human bondage. You jackbooted "Medicare" thugs will get Doctor Paul's phoropter from his cold, dead hands!
Has Rand Paul read the Constitution? Serious question! Because it bans slavery, yet it also says people shall "enjoy the right" "to have the Assistance of Counsel" in criminal prosecutions! Does Rand Paul know that we have been enslaving lawyers for 200 years?
The nice thing about Paul is that he makes many Randian arguments sound precisely as stupid as they are. If I were a non-stupid libertarian I would probably not get much joy from Paul's success and prominence.
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