I kinda like Rand Paul, but I don’t support anybody as ruler-in-chief

By David McElroy · March 13, 2013

Of the politicians currently in Congress, Rand Paul is probably the one whose views would be least damaging to the country if he were made president. In other words, I consider him the “least bad” of the bunch.

Despite that — and despite the fact that I liked his political theater last week — I won’t support him for president. It’s for the same reason I didn’t support his father for president. I don’t want anybody to be president.

I’m opposed to the entire current system. I don’t support any system that says it has the power to tell others what to do and says it has the power to steal their money. The idea at the core of our system as it’s constituted — that the majority have the right to make up rules that everyone else has to obey — is immoral and evil. Anybody who takes the reins of power in that system is giving legitimacy to that idea.

Some people who see themselves as pragmatists believe they should be a part of the system, saying that it’s the only way to influence the system and that since the system is going to exist, we might as well accept it and get seats at the table when the power is divvied up. I understand that position, because I tried to live that way for awhile. Eventually, though, I had to give it up as morally bankrupt.

Even if you’re a libertarian — of the minarchist type — and believe it’s OK to establish a central governing authority over what we call the United States, Rand Paul isn’t much of a libertarian. He’s an odd mixture of libertarian and pragmatist conservative. That might actually sell well in a future Republican primary, but it shouldn’t carry much weight with libertarians.

Paul endorsed Mitt Romney for president last fall, but I’m willing to hold my nose and give him a pass on that one, if I’m evaluating it from a minarchist Republican point of view. He was playing the political party game, the one that says you must support your party’s candidate for president — whoever he is — after the nomination process is over. I understand that. Once you’ve made the decision to play that game, you have to go through the formality of throwing your support to the party’s standard-bearer, at least after it no longer matters.

When Rand Paul was running for the Senate in Kentucky, he was very clear about not being a libertarian, despite the fact that his opponents tried to hang the label on him.

“They thought all along that they could call me a libertarian and hang that label around my neck like an albatross, but I’m not a libertarian,” Paul told Time magazine.

Especially on the issue of foreign policy, Paul is much more willing to support the United States intervening in the affairs of other countries. For instance, he supported sanctions against Iran. He also voted in favor of keeping the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay open, despite the vile indefinite imprisonment of various people who’ve never been given trials or an opportunity to defend themselves.

Paul doesn’t necessarily support the muscular foreign policy favored by the Bush administrations or someone such as Dick Cheney — who ever seemed to meet a country he didn’t want to invade — but he also doesn’t support the libertarian notion of leaving the rest of the world alone as long as they’ll leave us alone.

Rand Paul is a conservative with libertarian leanings. In many ways, he’s a throwback to the Old Right of the 1960s and before. He would be a definite potential improvement over an Obama or Bush, but someone such as Paul would be a stop-gap solution at best, even if he could get enough people to go along with him.

The only reason I take this Paul seriously as a presidential candidate — when I didn’t take his father seriously — is that he’s not a libertarian.

If you’re a libertarian of the minarchist type and you’re hoping for a president to implement libertarian solutions for the country, Rand Paul will disappoint you. I think he’s a shrewd politician. I think he’s a very intelligent man. I even like him. But his principles are the same as his father’s.

Even if you still believe in the possibility of salvation through the election process, Rand Paul isn’t your savior.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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