I adore Rachel Maddow. Her quirky sense of humor and love of wonkery is at turns awe inspiring and bug cute. However, I think she did a lot of folks a disservice in the Rand Paul interview. She picked at the hypothetical civil rights vote like this guy I sat across the aisle on a transcontinental flight last week picked at his scalp for the entire five hour flight. Both made me squirm.
Paul had been well coached not to give Maddow a sound bite he thought could be used in commercials against him later. However, when your worldview basically boils down to something like "you are not the boss of me," it makes for some pretty wild tap dancing on a whole raft of issues. I would have liked Rachel to pursue the actual tenets of libertarianism, one wonk to another. I don't think Paul would have been able to resist. After all, at first glance, it seems to make sense.
As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others.
Preamble to the Libertarian Platform
The central tenet of libertarianism is that each individual should be responsible for their own actions.
• Parents should pay to educate their own children, which inevitably results in shutting down the Department of Education
• People should have the right to choose their own health care, which inexorably leads to pulling the plug on Medicare and Medicaid
• Companies should not be restricted from operating how they see fit, so say goodbye to minimum wage, overtime and non-discrimination laws
Paul’s only real inconsistency with textbook libertarian views appears to be his break with his own party on abortion. The party actually calls for it to be a matter of individual conscience. But that may be the cost of dealing with the tea partiers, I don’t pretend to know.
But why does he think these things? That’s the real question. Libertarianism requires that you believe people are rational actors, acting in their own personal self interest, with access to the information and tools to make good decisions. Hey, in the libertarian world view there is no need for an EPA, because property owners are the best stewards of their own land.
It makes a limited sort of sense, libertarianism. It would be pretty to think that we really were that smart to be able to choose so well. It would be comforting to believe that we could be insulated so much from the bad decisions of others that we could simply let go of worrying about the stability of the society as a whole. It would be so simple if we were each out there rationally looking out after our own interests and those of our families...many happy free cogs not gumming up each others works.
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.
Robert A. Heinlein
But we’re not rational actors. And in a society where everyone is armed, people are not always polite. Many times they are just dead.
When we don’t act as a virtual village to raise our children, we run the risk of raising feral generations –we’ve all seen the child soldiers hanging off trucks with automatic weapons in Somalia. When we don’t establish reasonable climates for business, we are likely enough in certain places to find entrepreneurs running lucrative kidnapping startups.
As for education: in studying emerging economies the wonks note that "the effects of schooling of girls are readily observable for a number of factors: fertility, contraception, age at marriage, infant mortality, and reduction of inequalities between boys and girls." There is a reason we band together to try, imperfectly as we do... to mold and shape society.
I’d love to have her ask him about the authors of Nudge, and the architecture of choice. Is he familiar with research that implies it is possible to set things up for better investments for everyone, more savings for retirement, less obesity, more charitable giving, a cleaner planet, and an improved educational system? And if so, how does he think it would play out if the only folks doing the Nudging are companies engaging in free trade? Does this idea of an architecture of choice have implications for libertarians?
I would have liked to hear Rachel pursue these ideas to their logical conclusion. Ask twice, maybe three times to understand Paul’s views on legislation that would require a tradesman to trade with someone he didn’t want to. Nod and move on.
Ask his views on health insurance reform, quoting from the libertarian platform. Ask what political plans he has in mind for Medicare. Probe on Social Security and whether it counts as insurance or economic redistribution. And when time runs out... ask him back for a second or a third round. No one else is going to propose these questions – which should ultimately be very usable in commercials. And no one is better prepared to have a discussion that is both disarming and ultimately deadly.
I wanted more than one bite at the Randian apple. I wanted Rachel to lull him into a sense of false security. I wanted a little more Nudge and a lot less pick pick pick.
But damn, I’m glad I have the choice: to want better... instead of to throw my shoe through the monitor at Chris Matthews or David Brooks.