In FREE ENTERPRISE, I discuss a group that condemned advocates of a robust welfare state as daydreamers who promised "something for nothing." Yet these people, who, like Paul, depicted themselves as hard-headed realists, posited the miraculous, faith-based nature of free markets.
https://twitter.com/YALiberty/status/1341094773940232192
Paul’s critique, founded upon a kind of inverted producerism, has a long genealogy. 
In 1950, Robert Bremen’s noted the “semantic somersault” of the phrase “something for nothing”: it had become “a missile by the spokesman of big business and political conservativism to hurl at what they called the ‘gimme’ attitude of the common folk toward government.”
The Chicago Tribune got there before Rand Paul when in 1935 the newspaper editorialized, "the division is between people who want government to do things for them and people who, doing for themselves, must pay in the end for whatever the government does."
Rand Paul embraces what Karl Polanyi called a "utopian market economy" and like others before him, thinks he is the hard-headed realist.
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