Rand Paul: solve vaccination issues by making children into property

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::sigh:: I’ll just get this one out of the way:

Christ, what an asshole.

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Does that help? If you chose not to maintain your property, as is your right, and this damages my property, perhaps even rendering it completely non-functional then do I sue you? Or what?

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Aww! Right back to the good old days of the Roman Republic and the ‘Paterfamilias’!

Snark aside, though, hasn’t the “Liberty consists of the state not interfering in the affairs of white, male, landowners; or in their use and disposal of such diverse chattels as crops, cattle, untreated industrial waste, women, and negro servants” strain been running through ‘Libertarianism’ for a long, long time? There are ‘libertarians’ who don’t subscribe to it; but you don’t have to go poking too hard before either an overt statement or a formulation of ‘freedom’ that only really works if constrained to property-holding heads of household pops up.

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Oh, sure, a giant mess of civil torts that totally won’t become unmanageable(because reasons) is fine, so long as the Dead Hand of The State stays out of it.

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Nope - tort reform! Externalities are for liberals.

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

Parents, you don’t own your kids. The state is not obligated to let you do whatever you want with them or to them. They are actual human beings with their own sense of self.

Why is this a difficult concept for some people to grasp?

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So I should hold off on selling my kids…?

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You’re probably OK to go if you have the original pink slips for 'em.

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If a person’s property becomes a public nuisance, particularly if it endangers the health of the community, the owner can be either required to do something about it or forfeit the property.

Now I’m not saying children are like mosquito-infested swimming pools in someone’s backyard…I’m letting Rand Paul say that.

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  1. libertarianism
  2. ???
  3. idiotic nonsense
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The problem with letting Rand Paul say things is, well, he says them.

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Looking both ways when crossing a street causes irreparable neck damage and paralysis later in life. I will not be teaching my children to look both ways when crossing a street.

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Shush!

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In THIS market?

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So this makes what, three Republican presidential contenders attempting to turn childhood vaccinations into a partisan issue? I don’t see any way this doesn’t turn out to be a very harmful development.

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Oh yeah, and now washing your hands is apparently a huge liberal conspiracy, too.

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Unfortunately, in the Paul family’s version of utopia, you would be responsible for having not properly done due-diligence and protected your property. Somehow. Maybe by moving away?

Because, freedoms!

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It’s the perfect platform: a shitstorm of family values, anti-government paranoia, and anti-science conspiracy crap.

Sigh.

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Sad that Rand Paul doesn’t even understand the basis of his own professed philosophy’s thinking. He worships at the altar of John Stuart Mill, but fails to remember that the foundational thinker of classical liberalism (and civil liberties) considered leaving children uneducated and unprotected, with those definitions decided by the body politic, to be crimes against the children. He professes an interest in Murray Rothbard but fails to even internalize Rothbard’s highly flawed “houseguest” analogy, and ignores modern libertarian thought on how children have quasi-freedoms and impose duties on parents in a way fundamentally different from chattels.

Libertarian, and frankly classical liberal thought has wrestled with this issue for decades. Liberalism came up with a decent synthesis. Anarcho-libertarianism has not, because it can’t deal with the idea that someone can be less than a fully autonomous, rational, mature person with full rights and responsibilities (which is its fundamental flaw anyway). Rand Paul is neither. He’s just a hack that appears to have learned his political philosophy from reading cliffnotes.

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