Craziest Republican of the Day: Rand Paul

By Michael J.W. Stickings

For likening health care to, yes, slavery:

With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction. I'm a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you're going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.

Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone's services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you're basically saying you believe in slavery.

I'm a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That's ultimately what the right to free health care would be.

This is crazy -- and almost unfathomably stupid. (It's only fathomable at all because of who said it and what party he belongs to.)

It would mean that not just health care but democracy itself, with its right to vote, is slavery, not to mention the judicial system, with the Sixth Amendment's rights to trial by jury and representation by counsel.

It would mean, even more broadly, that anything that requires anyone to do anything is slavery.

This may the reductio ad absurdum of Rand's Tea Party brand of extremist right-wing libertarianism, or it may just be a reflection of the man's own personal brand of ideological insanity. Whatever the case, it shows him, once more, to be one of the craziest of a truly crazy lot.