Picture it if you will: You are politically committed to an ideal of government that has never been tested in the history of civilization... the closest approximation of which was probably the Gilded Age in the United States but even that had far too much Government power for your tastes.
Nope - you're certain of it. If Government just did basically nothing then everything would be OK.
In terms of economics, you're a student of what is known as the "Austrian School," which can be closely approximated as "Economic Agnosticism." "We can never understand how markets work so it's just best to let them do whatever they want." Paul Krugman defines the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle as...
...being about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire.
When your head is screwed on THAT straight, it's a safe bet that your other beliefs are certainly NOT completly nuts.
Since we've established that Tea Party / Rand Paulian principles are Completely Logical™, it should come as no surprise to us what the latest announced platform of the Tea Party is:
Repealing the 17th amendment.
That's right--that pesky part of our constitution that allows the direct election of Senators.
Rand Paul's most rabid supporters would empower the Kentucky Political Establishment--which views Paul as a batshit insane embarassment--to select Senators instead of the people of Kentucky. It's unclear to me how anyone can see this view as extreme though... Repealing the 17th amendment has also been advocated by such even-tempered voices as George Will, Alan Keyes, and Zell Miller--who incidentally threatened to "Shoot the bastard 17th amendment right between its Yankee Eyes" if he ever saw it out in Public.
The fantasy at work here is that without direct election of Senators, Senators would somehow be more accountable to the states they represent. The reality of course is much different. Since the 17th amendment wasn't passed until 1913, and we know who Senators were accountable to before then.... the dominant party machine in whatever state they represented, which was essentially "owned" by whatever the biggest business interests in the state was. Whatever was best for the local oligarch was best for the Senator in the long run, no matter what the impact on the actual people in the State was.
But perhaps the former is not their fantasy, perhaps the latter is... a United States Senate where the Senators appear and debate as branded as NASCAR drivers... Rand Paul himself might even actually be endorsed BY NASCAR.
It's funny to think that embedded in their philosophy is the seeds of their own destruction... they want to change government to a form where it was impossible for them (or anybody else who wasn't a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, a Hearst, or whatever) to have any input on it.
But then you stop laughing when you realize it's got the seeds of everybody else's destruction sown into it too.