Note that Paul didn’t explicitly endorse such a solution. And that’s the libertarian dilemma: it’s morally difficult to refuse aid to children born into poverty, because they don’t fit the model that says poverty is the result of personal failure. A newborn living without adequate resources is just unlucky. But rather than saying that vulnerable people living in poverty deserve assistance, a few libertarians argue that such people simply shouldn’t exist…

It is the helplessness and innocence of children that make their entitlement to assistance so fundamentally clear and therefore so difficult to fold into a truly libertarian polity. This is perhaps why, for all the sex that Ayn Rand’s characters have — most of them unmarried, many adulterous — they never seem to have children. It’s hard to maintain an ethic of total self-reliance and individualism when a child’s dependency so frankly and obviously demonstrates the moral bankruptcy underlying such principles.