“I think Republicans could only win in general if they become
more live and let live,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tells Reason TV
at Lincoln Labs’ Reboot
Conference, which was held July 18-20 in San Francisco.
Paul sat down with Nick Gillespie to talk about the future of
the GOP, the need to reach the 80-million-strong Millennial
Generation, why having a strong national defense doesn’t mean
constant military interventions, and what Washington, D.C. can
learn from the entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley.
When asked whether he would vote to end the taxpayer-funded
Export-Import Bank, which helps foreign companies buy U.S.
products, is widely seen as a leading example of corporate welfare,
and is coming up for a vote in September, Paul replied:
Absolutely. If I’m a Republican and I’m going out and saying,
“We have limited resources and we can’t have everyone on food
stamps,” by golly I need to be a Republican who says “we’re not
giving one penny of corporate welfare.”
About 13 minutes.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Paul Detrick. Shot by
Detrick and Tracy Oppenheimer. Music by Podington Bear and
photos by Elvert
Barnes and thisisbossi.
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Below is a rush transcript of the conversation. All quotes
should be checked against the video.
REASON: Hi I’m Nick Gillespie with Reason TV, we’re at the
reboot 2014 Conference and we’re talking with Senator Rand Paul
from Kentucky. Senator, thanks for talking with us.
RAND PAUL: Glad to be with you, Nick.
REASON: What can the rest of the country learn from Silicon
Valley?
PAUL: Y’know I think the amazing thing out here, is the
relentless energy and drive to move forward, and they don’t wait to
say “Hey, how can government fix this, or how can even somebody
else fix it?” They fix it themselves or they find a niche, like
they find taxi cabs have a monopoly and they ask “how are we going
to stop a monopoly?” and they start Uber. So I think it’s just the
amazing ingenuity and amazing that they’re not going to wait for
somebody else to do it.
REASON: They’re not even thinking about government, they’re
getting on with their business and then dealing with it
afterwards.
PAUL: Right.
REASON: What can Silicon Valley learn from other parts of
the country?
PAUL: Well I think one of the things is that Silicon Valley
went pretty Democrat, they supported the president. I think they
just need to reevaluate and say, “All the things we do here, the
success of Silicon valley, would that happen if we had a big
government that had internet taxes and internet regulation? Would
Silicon Valley have ever developed if big government got in the way
of the development of the internet?” In fact, people say that the
beauty of the internet and why it’s developed so phenomenally is
that every other industry we have in the country is heavily
regulated. It’s one of the few industries that really has very
little regulation.
REASON: Why do you think Silicon Valley has gotten more
politicized, at least since the Microsoft anti-trust case in the
early 2000s? Why has it gone so Democratic then?
PAUL: I don’t think they’re complete comfortable in either
party. And I know you and Matt [Welch] have written about the
demographics of where people are, and I truly believe the
conclusion that a plurality of people are no longer Republican or
Democrat. Silicon Valley I would put right in that demographic. If
you ask people out here, “Are you more fiscally conservative? Less
taxes than the president? Less regulations?” they’ll say, “Yeah,
I’m more conservative than the president.” “Are you more moderate,
more liberal than the Republicans on social issues?” They’ll say,
“yes.” They don’t fit neatly in either category. I think they’re
primed for someone who would come to them with a message that’s not
entirely Republican and not entirely Democrat.
REASON: You gave a speech here at the Reboot Conference and you
were talking about how a company like Uber, or many internet
services, they create their own regulation where even the drivers
and the riders are being regulated. Does that new model of
regulation work in, say, the coal industry? Can you do that new
form of regulation in old industries?
PAUL: I don’t know, that’s a good question. But there is a
question of externalities that in a way the two parties regulate
but a third party is affected like air pollution and things. Many
libertarians over time have written over how property rights should
be able to stop pollution, or limit pollution, although it’s fairly
complicated in the sense that it’s not an all or none. Sometimes
society will tolerate somewhat. We all drive cars. We all have
electricity. So there’s some emissions and we have to, as a
society, develop what is acceptable. Could that be done by the
crowd responding to pollution? I’m not positive, but I do think
that there are many things where government becomes overzealous in
regulations, whereas the crowd, the people who buy stuff and judge
as you sell it to me, they want a good product, but they also want
an honest product that’s fair and without safety concerns. It’s a
better role for the crowd to regulate things than the government
because the government only knows the downside of regulation, they
don’t look at the upside of employment and distribution of
products.
REASON: Talk a little bit about benefit corporations. You’ve
been speaking a lot about that, and that seems to be pretty much in
tune with Silicon Valley or the tech community. What is a benefit
corporation and why do you think they’re important?
PAUL: A benefit corporation allows a corporation to do something
they think is good for the environment or good for people and they
don’t have to look as strictly at their bottom line. To me it goes
along with the freedom argument that if you own your business, you
tell your shareholders what you’re going to do. You either always
maximize profit or you’re gonna mostly maximize profit and
sometimes do things for the environment. I think businesses should
have that freedom. I’ve supported something called a B-Corporation
that allows you to file and say “Y’know what? Sometimes we’re going
to do something that’s a bit more expensive when we get rid of our
waste because we believe in keeping the environment clean.”
REASON: This seems to be part of a broader social movement where
work is a form of self-expression in a way that it may not have
been 50 or 60 years ago.
PAUL: To me, if you talk about the health of the psyche, or the
health of the soul, I think work’s an amazing thing. It’s a lot
like what [Cato Institute president] John Allison says is “earned
self esteem.” No one can give you self esteem. Self esteem’s
important, and we’ve got a culture that loves self esteem so we
want to give it to everybody. It’s like “2+2=5” and “oh Johnny, we
want you to feel good about that.” Johnny needs to learn that 2+2=4
and then he can feel good about it and then he’ll earn his
self-esteem. It’s also that, really our culture, we need to really
reinforce with people how important work is, not as punishment, but
as reward. And so, from a governmental point of view, that I want
everybody to work. I will have plans that will have everybody work,
not as punishment but as reward.
REASON: Foreign policy is an issue that you’re at loggerheads a
lot with, not just with establishment Democrats like Barack Obama
or Hillary Clinton but with members of the Republican party like
Chris Christie, John McCain, recently Rick Perry. What is your
foreign policy vision and how do you answer people who say you’re a
“namby pamby isolationist” who just wants to lock everything into a
Fortress America?
PAUL: I think anytime anyone uses the world “namby pamby” we all
fight so if you say that again that’ll probably lead to
fisticuffs.
Seriously, the number one priority of the federal government is
to defend the country. It’s in the constitution, it’s
constitutional, it’s a priority. And for me, if you ask me, when
tax dollars are sent by the people to Washington, where’s the
priority? To me the priority is in defending the country. Now when
we get beyond that, then we would say, “How often should we be
involved with a civil war in Syria?” I think there’s a spectrum
from, “we’re never involved anywhere in the world” or, “we’re
always involved everywhere in the world.” I think for many years,
particularly the last dozen or so, we’ve been very close to
everywhere all the time. I think there have been times in our
history (Eisenhower, Reagan, the first George Bush) where we were
much more towards the middle where we said “y’know what? War’s the
last resort. When we go, we vote on it in Congress, the people’s
representatives have to vote. That’s what the constitution says. We
go reluctantly.” Or as Reagan said in one of his first inaugurals
which I really like, he said, “Don’t mistake our reluctance for war
for a lack of resolve.” I think that’s a good way of putting it. We
should be reluctant for war and I think America wants is someone
who will defend the country, someone who’s wise, and someone who’s
not eager for war.
REASON: How can this be a hard sell to Republicans? To the
establishment they’re like, “No, this is all wrong.” I mean Dick
Cheney is having his fifth or 10th heart attack every time you say
something like that.
PAUL: I think a few people in Washington don’t really represent
even the Republican movement. If you ask people right now, “Should
we send American GIs back into Iraq,” a majority of Republicans
will say “no.” In fact, what I would allege is that if we had 100
American soldiers who were volunteers and they were sitting here in
the audience, and you were to ask them, “Do you think that we
should go back, do you think you should be sent back?” I think
they’d say “no” now. So I think really the opinion has shifted but
I think the policy-makers are, a lot of the time, a decade behind
the public.
REASON: Do you think it’s going to be hard to untangle the
military industrial complex that Eisenhower and other people warned
about because when you start to say, “Y’know what?” And with the
budget plans you put out it’s not like you increase the baseline
defense spending either by much or if at all. But the contractors,
all the people who are one the tip for military industrial work,
that’s a lot of money.
PAUL: Today I ran into a guy who says, “I was military, my son’s
military,” and he worried about a strong national defense. Even
this gentlemen when I say that I believe it’s a priority, but then
I say, “You know what? We should audit the pentagon because we
can’t have a strong national defense if we’re paying 1000 dollars
for a hammer or 1000 for a toilet seat. So even if you do believe
national defense, which I do, is a priority, you can’t write
unlimited checks because you’ll bankrupt the country. The quickest
way to decline and fall of America is bankruptcy. People have said
that the biggest threat to our national security is bankruptcy. So
really, I think believing in reasonable spending, even in military
is a strong national defense position.
REASON: Reason recently did a poll of millennials, a national
poll. Only 22% called themselves Republicans or leaned that way.
Millennials, there’s 80 million of them, they’re the future
demographically. They overwhelmingly identify in favor of gay
marriage, in favor of pot legalizing, in favor of vaping and online
gambling. Can the Republican party shed the social conservative
issues which seem very central to its concerns? How is that going
to work? Can they win millennials without becoming more
libertarian?
PAUL: I think Republicans can only win in general if they become
more “live and let live.” Grover Norquist will talk about this
sometimes, this “leave me alone” coalition. But in order [for the
party to] work—and this is what a lot of people don’t realize this
and they say “oh well we want the Republicans to be the pro-choice,
pro-gay marriage party—it may not be that but it may be that there
are people in the Republican party that have those positions and
some who don’t, and that we all get along because we believe in
limited government and we acknowledge that the federal government
isn’t going to be involved in some of these issues anyways. And I
think that “live and live, agree to disagree” kind of amalgamation
of people in the party will allow us to be big enough to win. I
agree with you a lot on young people but I think also some other
libertarian issues like right to privacy, the NSA overzealousness.
Young people are concerned about their cell phone, that’s the main
thing they do with every hour of every day. I think if we became
the party that’s going to protect their privacy, you could get a
large switch of Republican vote.
REASON: Final question: The Export-Import Bank is coming up for
reauthorization. This is an FDR program from the mid-1930s; it
helped subsidize purchases of American goods and the Soviet Union,
it is one of the clear cases of crony capitalism. You voted against
reauthorization in 2012. Are you going to vote against
reauthorization again, yes or no?
PAUL: Absolutely. If I’m a Republican and I’m going out and
saying, “We have limited resources and we can’t have everyone on
food stamps,” by golly I need to be a Republican who says “we’re
not giving one penny of corporate welfare.” I’m not for giving
corporate welfare and I think a lot of people, if they knew that we
had to cut all the corporate welfare in order to have a more
reasonable government that can pay for itself, I think all of a
sudden people would say, “that’s an honest Republican.” What they
don’t like is a Republican who says “I’m cutting the food stamps
but by golly I’m keeping the corporate welfare.” It’s an untenable
position and Republicans need to cast that off.
REASON: Alright, we’ll leave it there. Thank you Senator Rand
Paul of Kentucky for talking to Reason TV at the Reboot 2014
Conference. I’m Nick Gillespie.