BBC anchor Katty Kay on Thursday asked former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) if his libertarian plan to have 20 percent of children home schooled made sense because so many women would have to drop out of the work force, but the former congressman insisted that even a woman living at a shelter with two jobs could find a way to do it if she worked hard enough.

During an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to promote his book, The School Revolution, Paul said he wanted to offer families an education alternative that emphasized “the importance of the individual versus, you know, everybody coming together.”

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“I want people to be able to home school their children,” he remarked. “Not everybody, this is designed to pick out the leaders who want to. And maybe 20 percent might be interested in doing this. But these would be leaders who would be talking about running for Congress and understand why the Federal Reserve is a problem.”

But Kay, who was guest-hosting, noted that “if you want to get to 20 percent of children who are being home schooled, that’s going to mean a vast drop of number of women in the workforce because it is largely women who are doing the home schooling.”

“A lot of women can’t afford to give up their jobs and home school their children, a lot of families can’t afford that, and do we actually want to encourage women not take part in the workforce because we know how valuable that diversity is?” Kay pressed. “I’m concerned about advocating home schooling on this level, when women are having such a hard time already staying in the workforce.”

“Those are the problems created by what I’m trying to correct,” Paul insisted. “Because they have to be in the workforce and they have to work and not take care of kids because of the system that we have because it’s survival for them.”

“There’s going to be choices to be made and some people will go out of their way for their children,” he continued. “I saw an article yesterday of a woman working two jobs and she was living in a shelter and she couldn’t pay her bills because her cost of living goes up much faster than wages. That’s another characteristic of this monetary system. So, that is a consequence, why they have to work.”

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“But if people really want to get it done, they can.”

Watch the video below from MSNBC’s Morning Joe, broadcast Sept. 19, 2013.