I heard Paul say that he wants to "make the Federal government as irrelevant to your life as possible."

In other words, like many Libertarians, he's essentially a states'-rights reactionary who, if he could, would revert to the Articles of Confederation, which granted so much sovereignty to each state that a Constitutional Convention was called to replace them.

But because Paul is a maverick by the standards of either party, he's looked up to as an "intellectual."