It’s no secret that many future conservatives call themselves Libertarian in college. Maybe it’s the socialist doctrine of their professors that push them away — however briefly — from the tenets of the Republican Party. Or maybe it’s the pull of college’s guilt-free experimentation. Who knows? But whatever the motivation for Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul was, a new cache of writings from his undergrad years at Baylor University show that Paul is a conservative Republican who once was unafraid to openly let his libertarian flag fly.
That’s not true today, of course. Not only is Paul the proud Republican nominee in Kentucky, he’s taken pains to make sure people know he’s most certainly not anything other than a card-carrying member of the GOP. “They thought all along that they could call me a libertarian and hang that label around my neck like an albatross,” he told Time in March. “But I’m not a libertarian.”
College Paul was bit different. As first reported by Greg Sargent, back at Baylor, Paul was more than willing to take up the libertarian cause. Writing on the Equal Rights Amendment in Baylor’s student newspaper back in 1983, Paul took a line on government intervention in discrimination that proved to be a tough sell when he tried to discuss it years later as Republican nominee.
Should we enact laws that say “Thou shall not be prejudiced in business transactions,” and then hope that the courts interpret such laws in a rational manner? Or should moral questions such as discrimination remain with the individual? Should we preach in order to bring about change, or should we compel?
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There’s more. The Lariat, Baylor’s campus paper, was chock full of Paul’s musings on political theory during the three years he attended the school (he left before graduating to enter Duke’s medical school).
Read a sampling of his work collected by TPM here.
Some highlights:
⢠Paul wrote that “bigoted discrimination is detrimental to the peaceful interaction of different sexes and races in the marketplace,” but he suggests that “moral questions such as discrimination” should “remain with the individual.”
“If you doubt the power of persuasion through voluntary cooperation, look around,” Paul wrote in the 1983 letter on the ERA. “Women inhabit virtually every sphere of our economic lives without the ERA. Change comes slowly, but it does come.”
⢠Ever heard of Ayn Rand? The young Paul was quite a fan. In this piece, he goes on and on about The Fountainhead and its main character Howard Roark.
Roark is “the man who refuses to recant,” Paul wrote. “The Galileo who stands aloof, challenging society’s circumscribed vision.” If such a thing is possible, the column gets more Rand fanboy from there.
⢠Of course, there’s a lot of caveat emptor to be found in Paul’s libertarian college writings. In this letter to the editor, the young Paul attacks the idea that companies should be forced to tell customers everything they know.
“Miss Herndon feels that private companies should be forced to disclose to the consumer money-saving alternatives (i.e. buying phones, installing phone jacks),” Paul wrote, referring to an article published earlier in the Lariat under the headline “Bell Hangs Higher Prices On Uninformed Customers.” Paul did not agree with the woman’s take on the situation.
“The implied conclusion of Miss Herndon’s article is that the consumer does not posses the means nor the intelligence for securing his own savings; therefore the ever-benevolent government should provide for the incompetency of the consumer,” he wrote.
Paul’s campaign did not immediately respond to my request for comment on the letters nor my request for the candidate to illustrate which, if any, of his views on the topics discussed have changed.
The release of the college letters comes on the heels of more revelations about Paul’s time at Baylor. You may recall the tale of Aqua Buddha, in which Paul’s membership in the band of merry pranksters known as the NoZe Brotherhood first made national headlines. Yesterday, Politico‘s Ben Smith dug into the NoZe group — which was known for harassing Baylor’s Baptist establishment — and found the Brotherhood’s less-than-reverential newsletter. Here’s a quote from that story:
“Randy smoked pot, he made fun of Baptists, none of us ever heard him pontificating about religion,” said one former NoZe brother who was in the group with Paul. “Fundamentalists didn’t join our group.”
The TPM Poll Average shows Paul leading Democrat Jack Conway 46.9-41.7.
