Paul has been characterized as libertarian and conservative. Political scientist Keith Poole of the University of Georgia claims that Paul is the most conservative candidate that ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 and had the most conservative voting record of any member of Congress from 1937 to 2002.
Paul is an anti-war activist who advocates for an end to US imperialism and a noninterventionist foreign policy. In order to preserve strong national sovereignty, he supports leaving both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations.
Paul supports the constitutional rights of political prisoners, including the right to habeas corpus and the right to keep and bear arms. Out of the three Republicans in the House, he was the only one to vote against the Patriot Act.
Paul is a supporter of Austrian School economics; he has written six books on the topic and has pictures of President Grover Cleveland, economist Milton Friedman of the Chicago School, and Austrian School economists Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises on his office wall.
Almost all proposals for increased government initiatives, taxes, or expenditure were routinely opposed by him; from 1995 to 1997, he accounted for two thirds of all the House’s lone negative votes.
He defends private property rights in connection to environmental preservation and pollution avoidance as a free-market environmentalist.194 In a 2009 Fox Business interview, he asserted that global warming is a hoax and rejected the scientific consensus on climate change.
According to Paul, “the government shouldn’t be in the medical business.” He advocates for doing away with government control and involvement in the health care industry, claiming that this will lead to lower costs because of the basic workings of a free market.
Additionally, he is against government influenza vaccination campaigns. Paul defends states’ rights to determine how to control social issues not specifically mentioned in the Constitution by citing the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
He is against federal control over issues like marriage, drugs, education, the death penalty, and capital punishment (albeit he supports the latter). In 2011, he said of same-sex marriage, “In my view, the government shouldn’t get involved.
If people made those judgments and it was a private affair, the entire nation would benefit.”He supported changing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the military to primarily address disruptive sexual activity (gay or straight).