So what would Rand Paul do about Ebola?
by digby
If you were wondering what the libertarian solution to dealing with highly contagious disease might be … keep wondering. All you’re going to get is this:
Sen Rand Paul in NH on #Ebola: It’s all over the place. You want to trust your gov’t but..gov’t is not very good at most things
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) October 16, 2014
Carla Howell, National Libertarian Party Political Director, says “governmental bureaucracies” involved with epidemic control are ineffective compared to private and voluntary efforts, in addition to costing too much money and violating individual rights.
“The sole purpose of government is to protect our life, liberty and property from harm caused by others in those few instances where the private sector cannot do a better job,” Howell writes in an e-mail to Newsweek. “Containing Ebola in Africa is best left to private charities such as Doctors Without Borders rather than the NIH [National Institutes of Health] or the CDC.
Screening is better handled by airlines and private hospitals that are both liable for damages and fully free of government red tape. (Sadly no such hospitals exist today in the United States).”
To be fair, some other libertarians who are running for office in Texas reluctantly agreed that as much as they loathe “government bureaucracies” like the CDC, they have “bigger fish to fry.” Others recognized that quarantines enforced by the proverbial men with guns might be necessary. Overall, they seemed to be more uncomfortable with implications of their belief system in this instance than we usually see. In fact, they remind of the anti-abortion zealots when confronted with the inconvenient fact that if they consider abortion murder they are morally required to arrest the women who have them. The spokesperson for the national Libertarian party is the only one who is unashamedly willing to spell out the solutions their philosophy truly requires.
Update: This piece by Ben Adler delves into the Paul’s ideas about public health and they’re very interesting since they’re both doctors.
More alarming, however( for Rand Paul’s patients anyway) is that he’s apparently an “Ebola Truther” — one who thinks the government is lying about the mode of transmission and that it can actually be transmitted by air.
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