New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) has been feuding with Sen.
Rand Paul (R-Ky.) for a while, and a couple of weeks ago, the governor
made his pitch at a Republican National Committee meeting in Boston.
“I think we have some folks who believe that our job is to be college professors,”
Christie said.
“Now college professors are fine I guess. Being a college professor,
they basically spout out ideas that nobody does anything about. For our
ideas to matter we have to win. Because if we don’t win, we don’t
govern. And if we don’t govern all we do is shout to the wind.”
Hearing
this, one might get a certain impression about competing contingents
within the party, and the larger fight between pragmatism and idealism.
Christie, in this vision, is the pragmatist, who has no use for Paul,
with his head in the clouds, pondering questions better left to
philosophers.
But the takeaway from this may be misleading. If one
is left to believe that the junior senator from Kentucky uses his
expertise on principles to compensate for his lack practical solutions,
this is a terrible error. Paul is neither the learned philosopher or the
practical problem-solver.
Take the senator’s understanding of the concept of “
rights,” for example.
“There’s
a philosophic debate which often gets me in trouble, you know, on
whether health care’s a right or not,” Paul, in a red tie, white
button-down shirt, and khakis, tells the students from the stage. “I
think we as physicians have an obligation. As Christians, we have an
obligation…. I really believe that, and it’s a deep-held belief,” he
says of helping others.
“But I don’t think you have a right to my
labor,” he continues. “You don’t have a right to anyone else’s labor.
Food’s pretty important, do you have a right to the labor of the
farmer?”
Paul then asks, rhetorically, if students have a right to
food and water. “As humans, yeah, we do have an obligation to give
people water, to give people food, to give people health care,” Paul
muses. “But it’s not a right because once you conscript people and say,
‘Oh, it’s a right,’ then really you’re in charge, it’s servitude, you’re
in charge of me and I’m supposed to do whatever you tell me to do… It
really shouldn’t be seen that way.”
Perhaps this is “a philosophic debate” that often gets Paul “in trouble” because he’s spouting gibberish.
As
Paul Waldman responded, it turns out “you can be a libertarian and not actually have spent any time thinking about those big ideas!”
Paul
is obviously unaware of this, but saying that health care is a right
doesn’t mean that doctors have to treat people without being paid, any
more than saying that education is a right means that public school
teachers have to work for free. Because we all agree that education is a
right, we set up a system where every child can be educated, whether
their families could afford to pay for it themselves or not. It doesn’t
mean that any kid can walk up to a teacher in the street and say, “I
command you to teach me trigonometry for free. Be at my house at 9
tomorrow. You must do this, because I have a right to education and that
means I am in charge of you and you’re supposed to do whatever I tell
you to do.”
All this talk of “servitude” and “conscription” is
just baffling. The only way I can interpret it is that libertarianism is
something Paul picked up from his dad, and it seems to go over well
with Republicans when he mentions it, but he hasn’t spent any time
thinking about it.
Now, I suspect some Rand Paul
defenders would say, “Fine, he doesn’t understand the idea of rights on a
conceptual level. But he’s more familiar with other stuff.”
Except, he’s not. The senator says he cares deeply about minority rights, which he
struggles to grasp. Paul talks about drone policy, which he
flubs badly. He’s expressed a great interest in the Federal Reserve, which he
doesn’t understand in the slightest. Paul claims to hate Obamacare, but he
fails to appreciate what the policy is and what it does. He says he’s deeply concerned about the deficit, but doesn’t know
what the deficit is.
The senator has a great number of opinions, many of which appear to be completely nonsensical.
And
that wouldn’t be terribly problematic – there are plenty of silly
people in Congress – except Rand Paul wants to be considered by friend
and foe alike to be a deep thinker. He is, in Chris Christie’s words,
the philosophical “college professor.”
As a rule, professors have
some idea as to what they’re talking about, especially when addressing
the issues they’re most heavily invested in.
Rand Paul still doesn’t understand what he doesn’t understand.
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