Rand Paul recently sat with me to share some of his views. The insights on his worldview left me persuaded that he deserves to be considered the most important public intellectual serving in the United States Senate.
Time Magazine calls him the most interesting man in American politics.
The Senates public intellectual chair has been vacant since the departure of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. As an M.D. rather than a Ph.D. Paul is less academic than was Moynihan. Yet Paul demonstrates a comparable wit keen intelligence and coherent worldview.
Sen. Paul works from the premise that people are more competent at solving our own (and each others) problems than is the government. The (sometimes) well-intended denizens of the nations capital have only one tool: government. Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote in
The Psychology of Science (1966) something that has been paraphrased into lore: if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail."
Little wonder then that Americans are feeling rather hammered by the Governmentarians. Little wonder that Governmentarians find Rand Paul baffling.
Attention DC. Here is the secret decoder ring for Rand Paul. He has a deeply held view that people are the ultimate resource. Tellingly Paul explicitly mentioned Dr. Julian Simon who characterized people as
The Ultimate Resource the title of a book whose second edition is described at
Amazon:
Arguing that the ultimate resource is the human imagination coupled to the human spirit Julian Simon led a vigorous challenge to conventional beliefs….
The best shorthand for Pauls worldview might be one coined by the late Nobel Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Gary Becker: human capital." Calling Rand Paul a Human Capitalist" captures him better than does conservative" or libertarian."
Paul also holds that the services provided by the government consistently are mediocre. Rand Paul in his own words:
The government cant even do a good job of something as simple as running the Post Office. How can it be expected to do a good job with something really important like educating our children?
The realization is dawning that government doesnt work. In Silicon Valley they already get this. And they are bright enough to be asking what we can do to solve problems.
The Department of Education cant fix our mediocre education system. But we can. Technology is making it possible for students now to access virtuoso teachers online wherever they may be.
The ability of people to connect with each other now is unprecedented. There might be someone on a lost tribe somewhere on an island in the Pacific Ocean with a solution to one of our big problems. We never were able to access that person before. Now thanks to human ingenuity we can.
The defeat of Obamacare will come from the realization that the very idea of a government-administered health care system is absurd … and by people opting out of the system and developing workarounds. For instance theres a surgeon in Oklahoma City who wont take insurance and who posts his prices.
That means the patient can shop around and by doing so the competition will bring prices down. Under Obamacare it virtually is impossible to find out the price of anything. Thats not the way to make health care affordable.
People now are unleashing themselves to go around government. Capitalism works as communism did not because it unleashes human creativity and capability. I am committed to bringing down the obstacles that government puts up that impair peoples ability to solve their own problems.
Eric Holder did the right thing in pushing back on civil asset forfeiture although more needs to be done. Civil forfeiture confiscating grandmas house because her grandchild was caught there with $40 worth of marijuana. That is just wrong.
Julian Simon was right. People are the ultimate resource.
Paul emphasizes unleashing peoples creativity. This is gives a more optimistic emphasis than the hostility to government that many consider the primary libertarian theme. Rand Paul is more righteously indignant about than hostile to big government. This matters.
Pauls consistent concern for the hardship the government inflicts on the marginalized is reminiscent of author Anatole Frances observation that The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges to beg in the streets and to steal bread." France also in
The White Stone anticipated Julian Simon and Gary Becker: The great human asset is man himself."
Paul as Human Capitalist has emerged as a major voice in the national conversation. He twice has graced the cover of
Time Magazine. The first time he was presented as one of the most important 100 people in the world. Then Senate minority leader (now majority leader) Mitch McConnell
wrote of him:
Spend five minutes with Rand and its clear he doesnt care what you look like or where youre from. Hes beating the bushes for anyone who prizes liberty and hes forcing people to rethink the Republican Party. … Hes having fun too. And thats contagious.
The second time on the cover of
Time was as
the most interesting man in American politics" wherein it was noted:
The freaks the geeks the oddballsthey mattered too even here. I tell people the Bill of Rights isnt for the high school quarterback or the prom queen" he said pacing with a microphone in blue jeans and cowboy boots hed borrowed from his brother. The Bill of Rights is for those who are unpopular."
…
He spoke to the crowd … with the enthusiasm of a graduate student in the early rapture of ideas.
The rapture of ideas" well captures one of Rand Pauls defining qualities. I have interacted with hundreds of officials and political figures over 30 years. There is only one other major politician I have encountered with a similar intensity of intellectual curiosity: the late Jack Kemp. And Kemp famously went on to t
ransform the world.
Rand Paul unlike Jack Kemp arrived in Washington with a strong intellectual foundation already in place. As recently reported in the
New York Times
Once when Chase Koch introduced Mr. Paul at an event he began by talking about how he too could empathize with the pressures of growing up the son of a prominent libertarian and having to read Hegel and Ludwig von Mises.
Taking the microphone Mr. Paul joked But did you get to read it in English?"
Read it in English? The opaqueness of Mises is
captured in the
Wikipedia description of his magnum opus
Human Action
based on praxeology or rational investigation of human decision-making. It rejects positivism within economics. It defends an a priori epistemology and underpins praxeology with a foundation of methodological individualism and speculative laws of apodictic certainty.
Praxeologically or otherwise Rand Paul follows a governing principle that serves humanity well: the ultimate resource is the human imagination coupled to the human spirit."
Rand Paul recently sat with me to share some of his views. The insights on his worldview left me persuaded that he deserves to be considered the most important public intellectual serving in the United States Senate. Time Magazine calls him the most interesting man in American politics.
The Senates public intellectual chair has been vacant since the departure of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. As an M.D. rather than a Ph.D. Paul is less academic than was Moynihan. Yet Paul demonstrates a comparable wit keen intelligence and coherent worldview.
Sen. Paul works from the premise that people are more competent at solving our own (and each others) problems than is the government. The (sometimes) well-intended denizens of the nations capital have only one tool: government. Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote in The Psychology of Science (1966) something that has been paraphrased into lore: if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail."
Little wonder then that Americans are feeling rather hammered by the Governmentarians. Little wonder that Governmentarians find Rand Paul baffling.
Attention DC. Here is the secret decoder ring for Rand Paul. He has a deeply held view that people are the ultimate resource. Tellingly Paul explicitly mentioned Dr. Julian Simon who characterized people as The Ultimate Resource the title of a book whose second edition is described at Amazon: