Rand Paul Appears to Come Out Against Calorie Counts and in Favor of a Progressive Income Tax
From http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid72584309001?bclid=72527732001&bctid=78606340001, at the Louisville Courier-Journal:
A: I'm not in favor of the government telling you what to do.... It's important that we try to protect freedoms.... Here's the next step. The next step is we tell you smoking's unhealthy we tell you eating's unhealthy, and that's already coming. In New York, they ban certain kinds of foods, they tell you the calorie count. And overeating is a big problem. So is smoking. Overeating might be a bigger problem than, well, to tell you the truth we would be better off if someone if we had a policeman tell you how many calories you could eat a day, but who wants to live in that kind of society? I don't want to live in that way. And smoking's going down every year anyway. We are winning the battle against smoking. Let's be happy with that, and not give up our freedoms in the process.
Q: You want to be a senator from Kentucky, which is a relatively poor and unhealthy state. What do you propose to do to enrich the lives of Kentuckians, if you are elected senator?
A: Well, I think Kentucky would do better, and we all would do better, if we sent less money to Washington. So I'm for keeping more money at home, and spending less in Washington. It's more efficiently spent, and makes us better as a people and a country. I think that there are certain pockets of poverty in our state and it amazes me how long this has been going on. For example, if you read Henry "Night Comes to Cumberland," it was written in 1961. And I read it the other day and it was like, this could have been written last year and it was written forty years ago and imagine how it can be in some ways worse than it was in 1961, with welfare dependency and drug dependency and unemployment and people not working. But our solution is always government. And maybe that is not the answer. Maybe we need to rethink how we fix things. For example, not only did we steal the Indians' land and put them on reservations, we destroyed their spirit you know by putting them on reservations. I think in some ways the culture of dependency on government destroys people's spirits. Maybe we lift people up in eastern Kentucky by giving them a tax holiday for a year, you know. You have to have jobs coming from businessmen and women. And maybe have no taxes in counties that have fifteen percent unemployment. See if you can get people working again. But also maybe welfare should have a local person, a man or woman who sits down across the counter from them and says "What are you doing to find work?" and gives them some tough love and says "Go to work!" It can work, you know. We've tried the other way, just cobbling people and giving people everything. Why don't we try just getting them to work?
Q: Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
A: 1:00:03: I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that in ended discrimination in all public domains, and I'm all in favor of that.
Q: But?
A: Ha ha ha. You had to ask me the "but." I don't like the idea of telling private business owners. I abhor racism. I think it's a bad business decision to ever exclude anybody from your restaurant. But at the same time I do believe in private ownership. But I think that there should be absolutely no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding. And that's most of what the Civil Rights Act was about, to my mind...
