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"TalkBack Live
Libertarian Candidate Harry Browne Discusses His Run for President
Aired July 27, 2000 - 3:00 p.m. ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BATTISTA: The Libertarian Party formed in 1971. It has offered a candidate in every election since. The last presidential race was the third with a Libertarian candidate on the ballot in all 50 states. Harry Browne was the party's nominee in 1996. He won less than one- half of one percent on the national vote.
Welcome back.
Well, as you saw there, in 1996, nearly a half million people voted for Harry Browne for president. Now, in the year 2000, Browne is again the Libertarian Party nominee, an investment banker and author. His books include "Why Government Doesn't Work," and his latest, "The Great Libertarian Offer."
Harry, thanks so much for joining us today.
HARRY BROWNE, LIBERTARIAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thank you. What a pleasure to be here.
BATTISTA: Let me start by ask asking you sort of the obvious question, because I think most people are not familiar with the Libertarian Party. They don't know what it stands for, what the platform is. So, what is it all about?
BROWNE: Well, it's very simple. We want you to be free, free to live your life the way you want to live it, not the way Al Gore or George Bush thinks is best for you. We want you to be able raise your children by your values, not the values of bureaucrats who think they're trying to create a brave, new world of some kind. And we want you to be able to keep every dollar you earn, spend it, save it, give it away as you think best, not as the politicians think you should have after they get done spending your money.
BATTISTA: I want to get into to some of the specifics around that philosophy. And I think there was a test at one point in time on several Libertarian Web sites that people could take. And I think the interesting thing -- we did that on this show for some reason, I can't remember why -- but it was amazing how many people took this test and turned out to be more Libertarian than they thought. So I mean, are there a lot more Libertarians out there than are registered with the party?
BROWNE: Oh, certainly. I have never met anybody who thought that Bill Clinton could run his life better than he can -- and run it himself. Yet, that's what's it is all about. When you listen to George Bush or Al Gore talking, what they are really arguing about is which one is best able to run your life, which one is qualified to decide what kind of school your children must go to, how your health care -- health insurance company or doctor must treat you. And they are all presuming to be able to tell you how to run your life.
Libertarians are the only ones who don't want to run your life, who respect you, and believe in you, and think that you are responsible and you can take care of yourself and you do not need somebody in Washington making all these decisions right down to how big your toilet ought to be.
BATTISTA: There are a lot of people out there, I'm sure though, who think they are not very good at taking care of themself. And I think, you know, do you scare people when you say, in some ways, that you want people to live as free and any way they want to? I mean, that's just very trusting, I think, of a lot of people.
BROWNE: Well, the only restriction we want to place on people is that you do not intrude on somebody else's person or property. But if you do not think that you are capable of running your life, the wonderful thing about America is there's all kinds of people out there who will be glad to take on the job for you. But what we want is for you to be able to choose that person yourself.
You choose whom you want to trust, whom you want to have give you advice, whom you want to manage your money, whatever it may be; rather than having somebody in Washington say: This is the way it's got to be, and you have to do it, and I have to do it, and everybody else here has to do it in exactly the same way, the way that has been dictated from Washington.
BATTISTA: Well, here's the rub for me. It's easy to run for president when you know you are not going to win -- I mean, realistically speaking, right?
BROWNE: It's a long shot.
BATTISTA: Yes. If you did win, though, and you did get to Washington, how could you possibly work with the Congress -- number one.
BROWNE: Sure.
BATTISTA: ... because you would want to get rid of that pretty much. In other words, wouldn't you have to work within the confines of big government if you did win?
BROWNE: There are so many things that a president who really wants to get government out of your life can do. I could go through the Federal Register and rip all the executive orders and regulations that previous presidents have put there. I could, on my first day in office -- and I swear, if I somehow elected president -- from the inauguration platform, I will issue an unconditional pardon to every federal prisoner who is in there on a nonviolent drug offense.
BATTISTA: This is part of ending the drug war also.
BROWNE: Absolutely.
BATTISTA: OK, let's get into specific issues -- an Internet question. Let me take that one first about taxes, I believe it is. "I am tired of the government taking half my pay check. How much of a tax cut do you propose?"
BROWNE: I don't propose tax cuts. I want to repeal the income tax entirely. And I want to unlock the door and let you out of Social Security, so that you can plan your own retirement, not with the 15 percent that the politicians are taking now and squandering so that there is no money set aside for your retirement. But you decide: five percent, seven percent, ten percent. Put it in a bank savings account. Put it in the stock market. You decide, because it's your money. You are the one who gets up every morning, goes to work and earns it. You are the one who should control it.
BATTISTA: I like that. I mean, I think most, you know, knowledgeable people would like that. But if you get rid of Social Security and Medicare and all those kind of stuff, for those people who are not knowledgeable and will not ever be terribly knowledgeable about what to do with their money -- or maybe they only make, you know, $17,000 a year -- who takes care of them?
BROWNE: Who takes care of them now? That's why we have banks. That's why we have mutual funds. That is why America is replete with all these alternatives that are available to people who don't know how to do things. I don't know how to take care of my computer. When something goes wrong, I call somebody. He comes over and he fixes it. And everything is all right. I haven't the faintest idea what he did. But I know it is fixed and it's working. There are other things that I call on people to do.
And when I don't know how to do something, or I feel helpless about it, there is always somebody there who is willing to help me. What I object to is somebody who says you are going to take my help whether you like it or not, and you are going to pay for it whether you like it or not. And even if you are not happy with the results, you can't hire somebody else. You have to take me. And that's not, in my view, the American way.
BATTISTA: Question from the audience here, quickly, Colleen?
COLLEEN: I would like to know his views on the middle class and the taxes. It seems we always seem to be getting squished in the middle, getting the most taxes, especially the self-employed, small- business person.
BROWNE: That's a very good question. The politicians always posture that they're concerned about the middle class and they want middle-class tax relief. But they can't do that, because the fact is, there aren't that many rich people in the country. And the poor people don't have enough money, so the money is going to have to come from the middle class. And as long as we have a big government that is almost two trillion dollars a year to finance, the middle class is going to get fleeced.
The only way you are ever going to get tax relief is by reducing government dramatically, by getting it out of all of these areas that it doesn't belong in. The federal government shouldn't have anything to do with education, shouldn't have anything to do with health care, shouldn't have anything to do with farms, shouldn't have anything with any of these areas, because all it does is make a mess of them. And you have to pay for it.
So, what I want to do is to reduce the government to its constitutional limits and repeal the income tax entirely.
BATTISTA: So, who pays then for things like public schools? Would that would be state governments?
BROWNE: State and local governments have always taken care of government schools, since government schools were founded in the 19th century.
BATTISTA: So, you are going to pay more state taxes likely, aren't you?
BROWNE: No, the federal government only pays about six percent of the educational bill in this country, but it controls about 50 percent of the rules. And education really began to go downhill in this country in 1960s when the federal government moved in. And it's made a mess of private colleges in this country. And it is going to make a mess of private schools in this country if George Bush gets way with vouchers. Because once those schools are hooked on vouchers, they are going to be subject to government rules. And they'll wind up being just clones of the government schools.
BATTISTA: To the audience -- Frank.
FRANK: How close is your position to Ronald Reagan, who wanted to reduce the part government plays in our lives?
BROWNE: Well, I would say my position is quite close to his rhetoric. But if I were president, the actions would not be close. Because during Ronald Reagan's two terms, government increased by two- thirds. And that's not right. I would be going to government to reduce government, I would -- the first thing I would do, even before issuing that pardon, is call Office Depot, and order a carload of pens to veto all the bills that come up from Capitol Hill.
And one of the things I would tell them is, I would not sign any bill that I can't read in 30 minutes. And another thing would be, that any bill that asks the government to do anything that is not specified in the Constitution is going to get a veto. And any bill that any senator or House of Representatives congressman hasn't read for himself and know what's in there is going to get a veto, too.
In other words, I am going to veto almost everything.
BATTISTA: On that note, we'll take a quick break here. More questions for Harry Browne right after this. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BATTISTA: Welcome back.
We are talking to Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee -- Tanisha (ph).
TANISHA: Yes. I am a 20-year-old college student with the University of Albany.
My question was, I sit in a lot of my classes and I hear about what the government does wrong, what we want to do to make it better. As the Libertarian Party, everything you are saying is sounding really good and I'm sitting here, I'm nodding, I'm getting happy, but is it actually plausible? Can it actually get done? And can I sit here and actually see, like, a blueprint of what can actually get done and it actually can come to pass?
BROWNE: We had a government like that once. And in fact, it was the passage of the income tax amendment in 1913 that gave the politicians so much money to spend that they then began to get into all areas of our life. But the real question to ask first, is this what you want? If it is, then quit voting Republican or Democrat, because that is not what those politicians want. And if you keep voting for them, you're saying, I want more and more government, I want less and less control over my own life.
And whether or not I can win and whether or not I could achieve everything in one term, by voting Libertarian you are at least telling the world that this is what you want and you are not going to take it anymore, you're not going to roll over and play dead for them, and I think that's the most important first decision to make. But yes, I think that I can deliver on most of this, but I am not going to tell you that I can do things I can't do.
But in my book, "The Great Libertarian Offer," for instance, there are about four pages of things that I will do on my first day in office that don't require any consent from Congress whatsoever.
BATTISTA: John in Connecticut says, "If you were to eliminate the income tax, how would you fund our national defense?"
BROWNE: National defense can be funded completely from just the tariffs and excise taxes that are already being collected. We don't need to raise those taxes and we don't need to replace the income tax with a flat tax or a sales tax. That is just rearranging the tax burden. It doesn't change anything.
It's reducing government that is going to give us tax relief, and what we need for a national defense is not the ability to annihilate every country in the world, but the ability to defend this country, defend it against missile attack and defend it from those rampaging Canadians when they come running down from British Columbia.
BATTISTA: How do we do that? I mean, the last time I looked, the Star Wars program wasn't working too well, so...
BROWNE: Well...
BATTISTA: ... how do we protect our country from a nuclear attack?
BROWNE: The Department of Defense has never been noted for being terribly efficient, just like the post office. What I would do is put up a $25 billion reward for the first private company that can deliver an actual working missile defense; not a plan, not a blueprint, not a contract, but actually show us that it can do it, and if that happened, then the taxpayers would gladly pay the $25 billion. And if they couldn't do it, we wouldn't be out a penny. But turning it over to the Department of Defense was deadly.
BATTISTA: While we are on the subject of national defense, then, let's get quickly into foreign policy. What is the Libertarian stance on that?
BROWNE: Well, we don't think we should have troops in a hundred countries around the world occupying them like we are the Roman Empire or something. I don't think we need the ability to annihilate everybody in the world. I don't think we need the ability to intimidate everybody and bully them into making settlements.
I don't think we should be giving arms and foreign aid to countries around the world, making enemies of all of their enemies. I think that what we should do is worry about the defense of this country, which we haven't done. All the trillion of dollars spent on the military since World War II and we still can't defend this country against any two-bit dictator who gets his hands on a nuclear missile.
BATTISTA: So you are saying, though, that we should not get involved in any global conflicts whatsoever. If that's the case, and we allow those just to sort of rage unchecked, then don't we risk an awful lot of destabilization out there? And eventually, that's going to land on our doorstep.
BROWNE: They do rage unchecked. They are going on all the time. Our president will decide very selectively which one he is going to get indignant about, and then he goes in there and make things worse. We haven't made things better in Haiti, we haven't made them better in Nicaragua. We didn't make them better in any country around the world where we have meddled. So what's the point? It's easy enough to say we should do these things, but the fact is they don't achieve anything. There is nothing we can point to as a success.
(APPLAUSE)
BATTISTA: All right, to the audience then and -- I can't read your -- Ticia (ph).
TICIA: Hi. I wanted to know, if you were made president, what would do you about the reform, the reform -- supposed-to-be reformed welfare, and how do you feel about abortion?
BROWNE: Was that welfare reform? Well, it's really funny about this welfare reform. The Republicans and Democrats are fighting to -- who gets the credit for reforming welfare and reducing it and so on. If you look at the federal budget, welfare spending is about 20 percent greater now than before the welfare reform took place about three years ago.
The fact of the matter is this is another area the federal government has no business in whatsoever and we should get it out of every one of the federal programs. Whatever should be done by government should be done at a local level, but government there isn't terribly efficient either. What we need to do is to repeal the income tax, put a trillion dollars a year back in the economy, and then we can take care of people with caring agencies that are voluntary and are not acting on taxpayer money.
BATTISTA: And the second half of the question was the stand on abortion?
BROWNE: I personally am very much opposed to abortion, and because of that, the last thing in the world I want is the government on my side, because the government messes everything up.
(APPLAUSE)
BROWNE: There are many things that we can do in this country about abortion that would really be effective. Number one, get rid of the restrictive adoption laws that get in the way; number two, repeal the income tax so that families can afford to have one parent at home to teach the children the values that really will lead to something other than pregnancy.
(APPLAUSE)
BATTISTA: So what you're saying -- let me just clarify -- so what you are saying is that you are personally against abortion but at the same time you do not think there should be laws banning or prohibiting it -- I mean, or funding it.
BROWNE: Look at what's happened with the war on poverty, poverty has escalated. Look at what happened with the war on drugs, drugs have escalated. Crime has escalated. If we had a war on abortion in this country, within five years, men would be having abortions.
BATTISTA: So -- but I am just curious how that would work then, if there were no laws that allowed you to get an abortion or prohibited one, would this become a state issue?
BROWNE: Well, it would become a state issue. But what you would have is a checkerboard of states around the country with different laws, and people could gravitate to the states in which they found the laws most compatible. That was the whole idea of the founding fathers' federal system. But it has been completely over-ruled now by the federal government, because the politicians will pass laws on any subject in the world that they can find some group to create a little noise about.
BATTISTA: Got to take a break, and then we'll come back to more questions.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BATTISTA: In 1996, the Libertarians had more than 1,000 candidates running for office nationwide, including 218 for Congress. There is a Libertarian mayor in California, and a Libertarian in the Vermont state senate. About 300 other party members hold local office around the country.
OK, Jerry is on the phone from New Jersey. Let me take his question first -- Jerry.
JERRY: Hi, Mr. Browne.
I agree with you on a lot of issues. But basically what I want to know is you have no chance of winning the election. Wouldn't it be more useful for the country if you put your energy and resources to lobbying for the causes you support, rather than run for president every four years and then disappear off the scene?
BROWNE: That's a very good question. Whether or not I have a chance to win this year, the important thing is, I believe we have a chance to make the changes necessary before the end of this decade. And if we just simply choose between Republicans and Democrats, it'll never get better. But if I can get a few million votes this year, it's going to bring people off of the sidelines, it's going to get the attention of the press and the public. and it's going to make it possible to elect Libertarians to Congress and maybe the presidency in the next two, four, six or eight years, and then you could have an America by the end of this decade in which you don't pay any income tax, you don't get locked into Social Security, your streets are not war zones because of the war on drugs, and all of the other things that we've talked about here today so far.
BATTISTA: Question on gun control up here.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, you say that your party is real big on individual rights and personal freedoms. I was wondering what your stance is on gun control.
BROWNE: The gun laws do nothing but put you at a disadvantage to criminals. Criminals do not buy guns in ways that involve waiting periods, or registration or gun locks, or any of those things; they buy their guns in the underworld or they steal them. The only thing that gun laws do is make it impossible for you to defend yourself. So as president of the United States, I would like to get rid of all the of the gun laws.
(APPLAUSE)
BROWNE: And one thing as president, is on my first day in office, I will issue an executive order disarming every civilian federal employee, including those guarding the congressman at the Capitol building, and I will rescind that order the day that Congress passes the necessary legislation to restore the full and unconditional right of every American citizen to defend themselves. BATTISTA: Question, what is the libertarian stands on the death penalty, from Nathan in Missouri?
BROWNE: Libertarians actually are divided on this, although I think that most of them oppose the death penalty. I oppose the death penalty also. But the fact is, that as president of the United States, it would be almost totally irrelevant, because there should be no federal laws against common crimes. Those are state and local matters.
BATTISTA: Up here to -- Innocent (ph), is that your name?
INNOCENT: Innocent.
I just want to -- let us go to foreign affairs for a minute. What's your take on the Jews and the Palestinians? Which one of them should have the Jerusalem as a capital?
BATTISTA: Is that a conflict that we stay out of?
BROWNE: That's absolutely a conflict that we stay out of. It is none of our business. It's a very unfortunate situation, but it's something that is going to have to be worked out there. And you have to ask yourself, why would these people come all the way across the world to have Bill Clinton mediate their dispute? Is Bill Clinton an expert negotiator? Nobody has ever claimed that he was. The only reason they are in Washington at Camp David is why? Because he has promised them that he is going to give you more of their money if they would just come to a settlement that would ensure his place in history. Once again, the politicians are using your money for their benefit. There is nothing that the president of the United States can do to make people who have been warring with each hating each other stop doing that.
BATTISTA: What about Cuba? Is Fidel Castro a threat to Libertarians in any way?
BROWNE: I don't think he's a threat, and it's very, very strange that we have all of this trade with China but we can't have trade with Cuba. You should be free to decide for yourself where you want to buy products and to whom you want to sell. This is not a question for Bill Clinton, or Al Gore or George Bush to be making on your behalf. If you don't like what's going on in China, then don't buy any Chinese products, it's that simple.
BATTISTA: Got to take another break. Back after this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BATTISTA: All right. We'll try to get in as many questions as we can here in a couple of minutes -- Jeff, go.
JEFF: Hi, you said one of the first things you're going to do as president would be to releasing all the nonviolent drug offenders. Do you planning on legalizing any drugs for medicinal purposes or any drugs that are now illegal? BROWNE: Well, absolutely, the federal government has got to get out this. There is no warrant in the Constitution for this at all. And in fact, alcohol prohibition came in by a constitutional amendment. They didn't bother with that this time around. Prohibition has never worked. It isn't working now. It is never going to work, and the only people who really believe in it are people who are diluted or who are making money off of it. What we need to do is to end the gang warfare, the drive-by shootings, put the drugs back in the hands of the pharmaceutical companies rather than criminal gangs that are terrorizing our cities. They're financed by drugs. We've got to get them out of the drug business.
BATTISTA: And Lorraine?
LORRAINE: If you're going to disband Social Security, what are we going to do with the money that we've already paid in, the money that's gone to nursing homes, for people that really need it now, and the money that parents receive to help take care of their mentally, retarded, disabled children, and funds that are being used to help, like, migrants get off of slavery in the migrant camps and things of that nature?
BROWNE: Thank you for the question. It's a very good question.
You asked about the money that you've already put in. Unfortunately, the politicians have spent it. They didn't put it in a savings account for you. They spent it on monuments to themselves or to prop up the Russian ruble for another hour, or things of this sort.
What I want to do is to sell off federal assets, the things that the government shouldn't own in the first place -- hundreds and thousands of federal buildings, unused military bases, power companies, commodities reserves and so on. Use the first proceeds to buy private lifetime annuities for everyone who is dependent on Social Security today. Get them out of the system. Let them know that they are taken care of and will never have to worry about political promises again, and unlock the door and let everybody else out of Social Security immediately and free them from that 15 percent Social Security tax.
BATTISTA: That will have ton our last question. Harry Browne, thanks so much for your time today. Interesting conversation.
BROWNE: Oh, thank you.
Any further questions, just go to my Web site at harrybrowne.org.
BATTISTA: OK. Thanks very much. Good questions from the audience.
Thank you for joining us today. We'll see you again tomorrow for more of TALKBACK LIVE.
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