Rand Paul: Who Needs Government When You Can Rate Your Uber Driver?

What's the most unholy alliance you can think of? Did you say "conservatives and libertarians"? If so, you are totally right! What would make this coalition worse? How about being full of techbros who do cool things like have " conservatarian hackathons " because the world didn't have enough stupid neologisms? Worse still? How about having the libertarian Godhead Rand Paul come and talk at you about tech so you can all fap together about how cool your Brave New Bitcoin World would be? Yep, that's pretty much the trifecta of awful.

Rand Paul showed up at the Reboot Conference, which is some gathering of conservative tech doodz, to talk about how cool everything will be when we drown government and replace it with Yelp or something.

Libertarians would win popular support, he said, “if we convince people we’re not opposed to government, we just need it minimized.” [...]

“The crowd wants good service — you rate your Uber driver, your stay at a hotel,” he said. “As information becomes more widespread, maybe you need less and less government.”

Well, such a stance isn't exactly a surprise for someone that invented his own ophthalmology board to certify himself rather than submit to the tyranny of being certified by the actual American Board of Ophthalmology. Who wouldn't want doctors regulated by the functional equivalent of Hotels.com?

Rand Paul had other Big Ideas as well, because there is no topic about which Rand Paul cannot wax stupid. Here's Rand on how he will disrupt education. 

The government, he said, should find and foster superstar teachers to wow students with online appearances. Yet in the classrooms “there will still be teachers, reinforcing the lectures and handing out homework,” he said.

It was not clear how that would lead to less government, or how the government would find what he described as “the LeBron James” of pedagogy.

Yeah, we're not really sure how if the government is a morass of incompetence that is impeding the great march of Randian progress it is also too a great choice for finding superstar teachers.

After all that, someone let Rand Paul talk about Bitcoin, because Bitcoin and Rand Paul were made for each other, really.

Mr. Paul would let a hundred corporate coins be coded. “Wal-coin, Kmart-coin, turn it in for Walmart stock, Kmart stock,” Mr. Paul said. “I think it’s coming.”

Thank god we've got Rand Paul moving us ever faster towards the corporatist tech dystopia that was hitherto unavailable to us except in science fiction books. #blessed.

[ LincolnLabs / NYT ]