You have watched throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and afterward as governments from the federal level on down have assumed the power to brazenly insert themselves into your day-to-day decision making. Telling you where you can go, what you must wear, who you can see, and other intrusions into areas of freedom once considered sacred to Americans. One senator has unfailingly stood against those intrusions on your liberty, Dr. Rand Paul of Kentucky. In City Journal, John Tierney explains Paul’s tireless defense of freedom, writing:
For all its virtues, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has never been considered a realistic film. Critics complain that Frank Capra’s movie is at once too corny and too cynical: one brave senator singlehandedly defending the public good against the thoroughly corrupt political and journalistic establishments. But we’ve been seeing a version of that plot for two years now, thanks to Senator Rand Paul’s lonely battle against Anthony Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control, and the mainstream press.
Like the politicians meekly following orders in the film, most of Washington has bowed to the CDC’s Covid edicts, but Paul has never tired of challenging the agency’s futile policies and dubious science. Like the movie’s media baron Jim Taylor, Fauci’s cheerleaders in the press and on social-media platforms have shamelessly pushed the party line—and worked hard to squelch opposing views, though they prefer to use “fact-checkers” rather than the street thugs whom Taylor hired to silence a rival newspaper. Journalists have smeared Paul, and censors have removed some of his scientifically accurate heresies from YouTube, but no one can stop him from regularly berating Fauci at the televised hearings of the Senate health committee.
Paul isn’t as folksy or likable as Jeff Smith (Jimmy Stewart), and his tousled hair isn’t quite as disheveled as during Smith’s epic filibuster, but he, too, likes to deliver lectures on democracy and liberty. Unlike Smith, he hasn’t read the Declaration of Independence to his jaded colleagues—at least, not yet—but he did invoke Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit at a hearing early in the pandemic, when he was pleading with Fauci to stop locking down Americans in their homes.
“The fatal conceit is the concept that central planning, with decision-making concentrated in a few hands, can never fully grasp the millions of complex individual interactions occurring simultaneously in the marketplace,” Paul told Fauci. “Only decentralized power and decision-making based on millions of individualized situations can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose. That’s what America was founded on, not a herd with a couple of people in Washington telling us what to do and we like sheep blindly follow.”
Action Line: The Americans I talk to each day, my clients and friends, are not interested in being shepherded. They want to form their own conclusions and make their own choices. Americans on Main Street are just looking for freedom. If you’re looking for freedom, click here to sign up for my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, and we’ll weather this storm together.
