Rand Paul Escapades at 'Historically Black' Bowie State College

By Robert Wenzel

Rand Paul meandered seven miles north of the Capitol Beltway to speak to an audience of black students. Well, that is probably what he wanted to do.

David Weigel  fills us in on the absurdities of what really went down:

[Robert] Stubblefield had a fourth-row seat for Paul's visit to Bowie State. He'd initially sat in a back row, behind half a dozen cameras set up to tape Paul. But several students in those seats were encouraged to move to the front. Even when they did, the student center ballroom that hosted Paul's speech was a little more than half full, with white libertarian visitors (at least 45 had signed up on a Facebook event page) complicating the image somewhat.

But from a libertarian perspective, the optics being too white was the least of the problems. Rand provided the crowd his solution for black men selling tax free loosies:

 "What reason do we have for telling the police that they have to take someone down for selling cigarettes that aren't taxed?," asked Paul. "Couldn't we give them a ticket?"

Say what? Wouldn't a libertarian solution be something like, "Let's stop taxing  cigarettes?" I wonder what the "white libertarian visitors" thought about Rand's take on that.

Rand's controllers apparently allowed only one question from the audience and Rand got smacked hard when that question was asked. You see, Rand wants tax-free zones in blighted cities like Detroit (but I guess not for poor blacks trying to make a living selling lossies). He told the audience about his tax free zone proposal, but he went on to say that it wasn't acceptable to just hand over "a billion dollars" and expect cities to fix themselves.

So the questioner smacked him. Weigel informs:

"We give Israel $3 billion annually," said Pierre Dorival, a sophomore at the college. "Where does that money come from, if we don't have it for Detroit?"

Rand did one of his  typical dance steps that they don't even do in Motown, to avoid the logic of the question. He said:

The other day we had people come in wanting money for diabetes. There's a lot of good causes out there, and they want money for it, but I tell them what I tell everybody else: If there's a cause you believe in, you have to figure out where the money comes from."

Who needs HBO, when you have Rand?


 Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher at EconomicPolicyJournal.com and at Target Liberty. He is also author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics