Rand Paul on Big Tech censorship

When the CEO of Twitter said the First Amendment doesn’t apply to them, he’s right.  But that doesn’t make him a laudable person or someone I want to associate with.  These are people who are narrow-minded and not ‘liberal’ in any way.  The impulse to censor people’s speech is actually illiberal.

~ Senator Rand Paul, "Interview: Rand Paul Slams Big Tech’s Crackdown on COVID ‘Misinformation’—And Offers His Solution," FEE.org, January 5, 2022

Rand Paul on vaccine mandates

You want more people to choose vaccination?  So do I.  You want to lesson vaccine hesistancies?  So do I.  You want to have that happen?  Quit lying to people about naturally acquired immunity.  Quit lording it over people, acting as if these people are deplorable and unwashed.  Try persuasion instead of government cudgels.  Try humility instead of arrogance.  Try freedom instead of coercion.  Most of all, try understanding that there's no more basic medical right than deciding what we inject into our bodies.

~ Senator Rand Paul, "'Do You Have A Science Degree?': Rand Paul Mocks Becerra's Qualifications To His Face," YouTube, 2:10 mark, October 1, 2021

Rand Paul on experts like Neil Ferguson

We really need to have competition among the experts, because we had experts - particularly that guy [Neil] Ferguson over in England - saying it's going to be 2 million, best case a million.  Well this guy has gotten everything wrong for the past couple of decades.  He predicted mad cow disease would kill 136,000 and 177 people died.  So we have to take with a grain of salt these experts and their prognostications.  The future is very uncertain, but turning down and closing the entire economy has been devastating.  That's a fact.

~ Rand Paul, "Rand Paul on heated Senate exchange with Dr. Fauci," Fox News interview, 6:15 mark

Phil Duffy: "We have reached the fork in the road for this nation"

The Trump Administration appears to be solidly behind compensating anybody who can spell Coronavirus, and Democrats would make the rest eligible as well. The other evening a chef at a high end restaurant made a very intelligent plea to rescue him and his fellow chefs.  Only Rand Paul has suggested that some of this might be overkill and that if we are going to do it, perhaps we ought to switch existing funds from unconstitutional foreign aid.

In the past, Fed interest rate reductions and rumors of government interventions into the economy could be guaranteed to accelerate financial markets upward.  The latest number for federal giveaways is $1 trillion which under the best scenario would saddle the government with a $2 trillion deficit, double the currently projected deficit. Never before in U.S. history has this occurred. Meanwhile the Fed has dropped interest rates effectively to zero and announced a $700 billion program of "quantitative easing" (purchasing of questionable assets). The desperation in that move sparked greater panic in financial markets with the Dow falling another 913 points. Clearly the federal government has run out of bullets and is only throwing gasoline on the economic fire.

We have reached the fork in the road for this nation. Either the people step in and tell government they have had enough, or they will pay the price of going down the road to Venezuela.

~ Phil Duffy, March 20, 2020