"The smallest minority on the earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." - Ayn Rand
Behind the scenes, the national banking sector is desperately trying to keep quiet about their mounting liquidity issues brought about by the sudden raising of interest rates after decades of quantitative easing, and 2024 will see the collapse of more banks and funds as their collateral goes bad and they are unable to post more margin to satisfy their highly over-leveraged positions. Even now they are crafting ways to, once again, be deemed "too big to fail" in order to get we the people to pay for it. For residents of the state, this will mean more layoffs, businesses shuttering, and more citizens exiting the state for more cost-friendly locations, and an increase in the legislature's attempts to tax you to meet its budget unless we force it to change.
Economics is one of my passions and reducing our state's operating budget as fast as possible is my UTMOST priority. The downstream effects of poor money management are enormous, quite literally touching on every aspect of our state's ability to function in the coming years. My concern is that we may be too late. If the Federal Reserve decides to keep interest rates high for longer, more banks and businesses will fail due to the cost of servicing their debt, particularly commercial real estate. If they take the politically expedient way out and reduce interest rates, inflation will roar back with a ferocity the likes of which today's youth will talk about for generations. They are stuck with two decisions, both disastrous to the economy.
That said, we still have an election to attend to. Libertarians differ from the two main parties in that we believe in getting government out of the business of throwing money--your money--into politically-favored programs. This is important in growing economies, but even more apparent in times of recession such as we now face. We can and must create a society that takes less and less from our labor, freeing each and every one of us up to spend our money where it's going to be most needed.
In the short term, that may mean using it to pay rent, food, medicine, child care, and other necessities as you try to get back to even, but the long-term goal is a society where you--not the state--spend and donate to causes, products, and services that matter to you, your beliefs, and factors that are unique to you. It introduces true competition by letting those who are entrepreneurially minded to invest in themselves and services/products they feel have value for everyone else, absent government corruption and coercion.
In order of our current spending priorities, our efforts need to focus on finding and/or cultivating private substitutes for the following biggest items in our state budget as quickly as possible, if we wish to be in a place where we can pay down our debts:
* K-12 Education (currently ~$35 billion)
* Health and hospitals (currently ~$31 billion)
* Public welfare (currently ~$21 billion)
* Police, Labor, Corrections, and General Government (over $18 billion)
* Higher Education (currently ~$18 billion)
* Highways and roads (currently ~$14 billion)
None of this will be easy, but we need to start...yesterday.
Post recession, we need to be a state that is once again home to small businesses and private enterprise--the heart of all great economies. We need to encourage and protect sound money, and we need to let competition in the marketplace determine who will be tomorrow's winners and losers, not merely those who magically win the lottery at obtaining a government contract who face no downside when they execute poorly.
Coming in as our largest state expenditure, our K-12 public education receives more than $35 billion in the most recent supplemental budget. Public education in Washington, while mandated in Article 9 of the state constitution, until such a time as it can be amended to support more decentralized, free-market, and competitive solutions, needs to be transitioned to a far more efficient and fundamentals-based program.
With more than 46,000 students and their families exiting the system for greener pastures since before the Covid-19 period, our budget nevertheless currently sees a majority of funding increases and those increases going toward teachers and administrators despite long-term downward trends in performance. As usual, our children suffer.
Parents (myself included) have been voicing their desire to see a more practical, hands-on curricula that produces robust young adults with competency in reading, history, civics, math, science, and finance/economics that is not watered down by current educational, technological, and political fads. They also desire to hold their kid's schools and teachers accountable through passage of a parental bill of rights.
We know that most of our educators are passionate about what they do, but we need to move to a place in our state that balances the rights of parents, the support of our children, and the realities of the economy together with those educators most dedicated to the cause.
This won't be easy, but my pledge is to work diligently with those entities that are actually involved in such oversight to negotiate priorities in a way that honors parents and that creatively solves our problems rather than just throw money at them.
Setting aside the fact that our current administration didn't even meet its own climate goals, setting aside the fact that government workers are never criminally liable for the results of poor environmental policies they make, and setting aside the political division in our state that lies downstream of discussions surrounding the environment, at it's most basic level, the end result of our current system is one where only those with wealth and means can continue to heat their homes, buy gas for their cars, charge their EVs, and live their lives (travel, shop, etc.) without change or inconvenience.
This is in NO sense equitable or just.
By artificially increasing the cost of energy through cap and trade programs, and through arbitrary restrictions or subsidizing of natural gas, oil, wind, solar, and other sources, the state is setting us all up for an impoverished future where it and only it has the power to choose what's best for you and enrich its donor class.
We all want to have clean air, clean water, and healthy ecosystems--liberals and conservatives, property owners and conservationists alike. It is only the state telling you that your perceived enemies HATE the environment and so you MUST force them to comply or "we're all going to die!" And why shouldn't they? They and their powerful connections stand to benefit while you pay for it all.
In the land of the free, do truly good ideas need to be forced?
It sounds absurdly simple, but the way to achieve our environmental goals without taking people's money to fund programs that the STATE chooses, is to stop taking that money in the first place and let everyone choose for themselves, using the same information freely available to all. Choosing one's home heating and power sources, what automobile to buy, what mass transit system to use, and the companies that best and most responsibly provide those services are all decisions YOU, the individual, are perfectly qualified to make without the government putting its foot on the scale and taking a cut.
My campaign promises are to:
1. Lift restrictions where possible on energy production, freeing YOU to support the companies and organizations best meeting your needs and goals--variables that will undoubtedly evolve over time. Nothing tells a business they're headed in the wrong direction like a customer base that stops buying what they're selling if there's no government there to prop them up.
2. Stop letting the government create monopolies by subsidizing bad or inefficient companies and organizations in the environmental/conservation space, freeing you to choose those that you feel are best at solving specific problems important to your life and location.
3. Promote private investment and encouragement in citizen- and small business-led efforts and competition.
Over the past 5 years, crime is once again on the rise in Washington State. This is due not to one, but a confluence of factors:
Abortion is likely the greatest wedge issue of our time. Any cursory look at "both sides" on social media quickly reveals the hypocrisy attending the current two-party system:
These are simplistic examples, of course, but they are commonly lobbed back and forth between both sides and share a common theme--state funding for the winner's side.
To my knowledge, Libertarianism offers the only consistent platform for abortion (even if many who call themselves Libertarians have external influences that color their views): Your body is your property and you are the only one in the best place to make decisions about it. And, as a corollary to that, it is not the state's position to fund or subsidize any medical procedure.
From my perspective, we cannot change the fact that nature made it so that biological females of our species bear children, nor would it matter if in some alternate universe it had bestowed that responsibility upon males. But we must be internally consistent in our principles and, to give the state the power to choose for us one way or another in this and any other decision is a mistake--one that has already divided us.
The best way to change someone's mind is not through force, but through speech. Keeping the state out of the matter obliges us to talk about it, debate it using reason, protest, and even fund groups that we feel best represent our positions, but at the end of the day, allowing the state to fund one side or the other adds moral insult to injury for those in the minority. Washington is currently investing $21 million dollars in the new budget for abortion and reproductive health care. That's a lot of money that could just as easily be raised without the need to extort those who are opposed to it.
Virtually everyone wants access to good healthcare at an affordable price. Libertarians think that the best way to achieve this is by removing government interference and enabling actual free markets.
Government inappropriately controls our healthcare in many ways:
Currently, the healthcare industry is virtually monopolized by the government and a handful of insurance companies. They hold the checkbook and wield it for their own benefit.
Each year, the government sets prices that they will pay providers including doctors and hospitals. Each year, these payments increase at less than the cost of inflation, while the cost of providing medical care increases by a far greater amount. This has unpleasant consequences for everyone. Providers are incentivized to do what is quick and cheap, not what is in the best interest of a particular patient. Doctors are forced to reduce the time they spend with patients, and this reduces quality of care. Hospitals are discouraged from upgrading facilities, and this reduces quality of care. Worse yet, insurance companies often set their payments according to the government’s prices. This regular ratcheting down on payments to providers, while actual costs to provide care increases, makes providers less able to provide high quality healthcare.
Government also regulates where medical facilities can be built, who can build them, and when. The process for applying for permission to build facilities is very costly and very slow, and thus favors the biggest corporations, preventing smaller organizations from opening new facilities that could serve patients. This greatly limits patients’ access to medical care and increases costs compared to a system where government permission was not required.
Institutions such as the Food and Drug Administration also limit cost-effective access to quality care. The approval processes for new drugs and technology is lengthy and expensive. Because of this, the process favors the biggest companies with the most lawyers. There are many stories of patients dying while waiting for approval of a new device or medicine. Instead, Libertarians call for free-market testing which will be inherently incentivized to be efficient and fair in their processes. Additionally, Libertarians believe in the “Right to Try”, especially in situations with a terminal diagnosis. The government must not be permitted to deny patients access to new medical advances.
Tort reform would also greatly reduce the cost of health care. The current tort system raises the cost of care by encouraging unnecessary testing and procedures which increase the cost of medical care by forcing medical teams to devote significant time and resources to preventing or defending against unwarranted legal actions. When legitimate claims arise, they should be taken seriously and resolved fairly through the courts. However, frivolous and fraudulent claims should not be tolerated, as our current system does. These disparage our healthcare providers and the quality of medical care they can provide and that we can receive. We oppose fraud in all forms.
Washington State has currently budgeted $31 billion for healthcare and hospitals over just the next two years on top of out of pocket costs that each citizen must pay. That is an awful lot of money that could be put back into our pockets to be used on providers and services we each determined provided better value.
A truly free market requires the free movement of people, not just products and ideas. Our problem is that our immigration system disincentivizes those who want to immigrate legally by making the entire process complex, expensive, and lengthy.
This issue is very personal for me. As the husband of a Japanese national, married for 11 years with 3 kids together at the time of application, the process for my wife to move with me from Japan to Seattle cost thousands of dollars, required tedious paperwork and lawyers, and subjected us to over a year and a half's worth of waiting despite having gone through all of the background checks for my security clearance as part of my government employment years prior. It required me to move back to the United States without my wife and kids while I continued to work and support them.
Yes, we need to be able to pick out the proverbial bad needles in the haystack, but the government is ill-equipped and under no pressure to perform efficiently and cheaply. Or maybe they had to charge me because they'd already spent my tax money fixing all the roads...
Of one thing I am certain: the majority of immigrants are seeking a better life. The fact that the government controls the border though, means it can be (and is) wielded as a political weapon often with corruption and malfeasance hiding close by.
As a Libertarian, I believe there are more efficient means to handle immigration that don't involve giving taxpayer money to non-citizens in the form of housing, food, clothes, phones, and stipends while the actual taxpayers are struggling to pay for these very things themselves.
While other political parties prioritize the rights of some, but not others, Libertarians value the right of all to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to live in whatever manner they choose. We also believe that the government must treat all people fairly and equally before the law.
To achieve that, we seek to:
Our state itself is already encroaching on some of these and signaling its desire to do even more. Whether it be through certain DEI, climate, or anti-disinformation initiatives (or their secondary effects), Washington is proving itself to be a good example of the fact that one-party dominance for too long makes railroading the rights of the minority of its citizens all too easy.