(Ayn?) Rand Paul’s libertarian fest

Capitol Hill’s leading libertarian in the world’s only country with a libertarian government – surely there is a story there. Senator Rand Paul (Republican-Kentucky) began a pre-Easter week visiting Argentina with a Sunday night reception at a downtown hotel also inaugurating the renaissance of the American Club.

The best of times or the worst of times? Reviving the immortal question of Charles Dickens almost two centuries later, Paul finds the metrics to favour the former categorically – when Dickens was writing, 98 percent of the world was living below the poverty line of two dollars a day (as adjusted by historical currency converters), when Paul married Kelley in 1990, a third was still suffering poverty but now the percentage is in single digits.

The libertarian senator was equally categorical about the roots of today’s prosperity – freedom, the rule of law and free markets and it was over the latter point that the veteran maverick’s recent friction with United States President Donald Trump started to show. Whereas Trump’s MAGA vision centres on repatriating industry, Paul stands by Adam Smith in insisting that prosperity is in direct proportion to the division of labour – if shoes are manufactured in Southeast Asia instead of being a local cottage industry, all the better for economic progress at home. Speaking softly but firmly, he thus parts company with Trump’s tariffs without spelling it out.

Opposition to tariffs coming out of presidential whim rather than Congress was also underlying his insistence on the separation of powers – but also misgivings about a war not submitted to legislative branch approval. With a national debt close on US$40 trillion, the United States needs this war like a hole in the head, Paul seemed to imply – while many people find Trump politically incorrect, the maverick libertarian would appear to be more concerned about his being fiscally incorrect (Javier Milei would be closer to his model).

High marks to US Ambassador Peter Lamelas for deftly joshing his way out of either breaking faith with his President or confronting an uncomfortable visitor – Lamelas was also at hand when Paul met President Javier Milei on Monday in order to head off any one-on-one in which push might come to shove when the subject of Trump came up.

Strangely enough, the hugely dominant issue of the Iran War failed to surface in the question time following the talk but since both Paul and Lamelas include long years practising medicine in their backgrounds, a question on medicare was perhaps inevitable. Here Paul placed his focus on means testing – people earning half a million dollars were only paying half their due, he pointed out, when the floor could easily be lowered to anything into six digits. His general recommendation for taming the enormous deficit was to change the Congress consensus – instead of reaching a compromise on the Democratic preferences for welfare programmes and the Republicans priorities of defence and security by spending more money on both, Paul urges them to reach agreement on cutting both.

The apple does not fall far from the tree – son of libertarian icon and three-time presidential hopeful Ron Paul, the Kentucky senator had a stab at the nomination himself a decade ago and should the Grand Old Party come a cropper in November’s midterms, he might just be the change in image needed for the 2028 US presidential elections.