I transitioned to my current libertarian perspective from a more conventional conservative one during the Tea Party movement during the early Obama Administration. I had already embraced an unfettered position on immigration and free trade, so this was simply a logical extension of those principles. Unlike many new libertarians, I was not influenced by Ron Paul's GOP POTUS campaigns in 2008 and 2012. In part, I didn't think he had public sector experience. Ron also seemed uncompromising, preachy, and spoke judgmentally about blowback to foreign policy. I saw him more as a gadfly than a leader, even when I agreed with him on many issues like neo-con foreign policy and the unaccountable Federal Reserve. I also have differed from him on specific issues, like his constraints on immigration and opposition to vaccine mandates. Via Google AI:
My differences on vaccines are fundamentally rooted in the nonaggression principle: you do not have a right to propagate your disease on unsuspecting individuals, especially those who cannot physically tolerate vaccines and depend on the achievement of herd immunity. Ron's position is even more appalling in the context of his lifelong profession as a medical doctor, with professional responsibility for promoting public health.
Familiar readers know I've eagerly endorsed 3 GOP legislators in the Tea Party aftermath: Congressman Justin Amash (MI) and Thomas Massie (KY) and Senator Rand Paul (KY), Ron Paul's son and an eye surgeon. Trump primaried the former: Amash's final sin was supporting Trump's first impeachment. Massie survived Trump's initial attempt to primary him after Massie angered him by opposing bloated pandemic spending. Trump finally got Massie after Massie's vote in a paper-thin House majority. I was so supportive of Rand's brief candidacy in the 2016 GOP POTUS primary. I still recall how Trump claimed he had "bought" Paul by supporting Paul's eye surgery charity effort in Central America.
Now I share many of my fellow libertarians' concerns about the pandemic — I was unemployed at the beginning of the pandemic and was one of those not declared "essential" workers. Out-of-state travelers were stopped under "stay at home" rules; maskless transit passengers were ejected. Some cities required vaccine cards to dine. I recall having to make an unprecedented reservation to get my hair cut. I understand the resentment towards an unaccountable, unelected technocracy of public health experts, guidelines being implemented with the same fervor as climate change alarmism. It became more difficult because COVID spread largely through bioaerosols that were hard to filter (for most, e.g., cloth facemasks). A significant percentage of COVID-infected individuals (maybe 35%) have been asymptomatic, along with a delayed rollout of testing for the virus and limited hospital capacity and qualified health professionals, which exacerbated public safety concerns.
Guidelines like the 6-foot distance rule didn't work for airborne bioaerosols. More effective N95 facemasks were in limited supply at the beginning of the pandemic, and there was an emphasis on securing those supplies for front-line healthcare professionals.
Still, it wasn't healthcare professionals who directed infected patients to highly vulnerable nursing homes like Andrew Cuomo. They didn't have the power to establish "stay at home" directives, patrol church parking lots for unauthorized worship services or pick winners (e.g., Walmart) and losers in a largely closed economy..They didn't constitute the incompetence of the Trump Administration in a failed, delayed original rollout by a federal monopoly of COVID tests, which could help contain infection spread, or quarantine returning American tourists from global hot spots. They didn't attempt to mandate things like vaccine cards to access business or go to work.I have no doubt that political power seekers exploited public panic and used dubiously evidenced guidelines under the pretext of "following the science".They didn't largely shut down in-person public education with disastrous educational outcomes..
Rand Paul had somehow fixated on Fauci as the government face of the pandemic policy failure. Hs singular fixation with Fauci has been one-sided and venomous, seeming to link Fauci to the pandemic because of past approvals of Chinese gain-of-function virus research, which (without evidence) he is trying to link to a hypothesized lab leak hypothesis, with very little evidence beyond a coincidental local regional research laboratory in Wuhan, one of the original hot spots for COVID-19.. (There are proactive reasons for gain-of-function research dealing with effective responses to future pandemic outbreaks(see summary below.) I am appalled by a medical doctor like Rand Paul fronting an anti-scientific Populism against a genuine heroic American health expert who has fought on the frontlines against multiple public health outbreaks.
In reference to gain-of-function virus research
But what particularly offends me about Rand Paul's obsessive war against Fauci is an attempt to prosecute him, to get around Biden's pardon. As I've tweeted, I think qualified immunity already protects things like Paul's fanatical attacks. Rand Paul already said he wanted Fauci prosecuted before the recent hearings. Nearly all the recent questions were nothing "new" about the pandemic; they had been rehashed over several hearings before Fauci retired in late 2022, 2 years before Biden's pardon. This was, pure and simple, a perjury trap, a variation of double jeopardy, where the intent was Paul's abuse of power in trying to get Fauci prosecuted. For a fellow libertarian to use the general government to go after a political opponent is an unforgivable breach of principle.
