>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Well, our connection this hour was made with an I told you so.

Looking around, seeing Ice agents breaking the law on American streets and shooting American citizens while American warplanes lead another war in the Middle East, with prices remaining high and tariffs eating into the money of average Americans, one group is saying that they tried to warn the American people.

Who is that group?

It's the Libertarians.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is the editor in chief of reason, the leading libertarian publication in the country, and writing last week for The New York Times.

Here was her assessment, quote Libertarians can be annoying with our constant bellyaching about privacy and taxes, our obsession with the First Amendment, and our fear mongering about jackbooted thugs.

But in light of how the past year has unfolded, consider cutting your friendly neighborhood libertarians some slack.

After all, we did try to warn you on immigration speech and trade.

Americans are living in a libertarian nightmare.

Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement.

Armed National Guardsmen walked the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order.

Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on everything from Gaza to Charlie Kirk.

Tariffs on China have been set at ten, 20, 54, 145 and 30% in just the past few months.

These stories are examples of a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism.

End quote.

But Ward goes on to say that libertarians have really been relegated to the fringes of American politics.

Why is that?

Instead of growing?

Instead, it's Libertarians are nowhere near their recent high water mark.

When former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson was angling for a spot on the national debate stage, and polls showed many Americans taking the libertarian movement more seriously.

So what's going on in this moment?

My guest this hour will have a lot to say about these issues.

He is the former chair of the Monroe County Libertarian Party, host of the A Free Solution podcast Kevin Wilson.

Welcome back to the program.

Nice to see you.

>> All right.

Great to see you, too.

>> And still a libertarian these days.

>> Still libertarian.

>> Maybe more libertarian than ever.

Given everything I just read.

>> Yeah.

I mean, I don't I don't like saying I told you so.

It brings me no joy to say that.

Like, again, we're we're in a world that, like, there's a very clear abuses of executive power happening.

There are mechanisms for limiting government, and unfortunately, we haven't taken them.

And it's been a bipartisan ratcheting up year over year to expand the power of the federal government.

And we see some of the dangers of that of of giving too much power to a centralized authority.

And unfortunately, we're we're reaping the fruit of that now.

>> So I want to hit a number of issues that Katherine Mangu-Ward writes about in her piece in The New York Times.

If listeners, if you want to read that piece, we're going to share it in our show notes.

coming up here.

But before we we get there, I want to ask about her contention.

She says the major parties have pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions small government, free market types for the Republicans, civil libertarians for the Democrats, preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it.

Libertarian voices have gradually gone quiet in the halls of the capital, bullied into silence or primaried out of resigned or out, or resigning in despair.

So what she's saying there is, even though she feels like she's been right about this, libertarians are feeling like you had been warning the American people.

This is a very in the wilderness time in the American political scene, in both major parties, and for the Libertarian Party in general.

You agree with that part?

>> I do agree with that part.

And the ironic part of when Americans trust their government less, they end up wanting more government sometimes because there's so much tribalism right now between Democrats, Republicans, they fear what will happen, sometimes legitimately.

What happens if the other side gets power, that they want to lock it in for themselves?

There's Chris Rufo before Trump was reelected, talked about this like, are we Democrats are using this power against us.

We have to use it against ourselves.

Everyone in this, in our political landscape is Boromir from Lord of the rings.

Oh, if I used the One Ring, I'll use it for good.

I'll save Gondor.

But no, it's going to corrupt you.

It's going to end up.

The power is going to end up in the wrong hands anyway.

What we need to do is cast a ring into the fire.

>> You just want Lord of the rings there.

>>, I did.

I'm hoping your listeners pick up on that.

>> I think they probably will.

Look, it's the idea that you can have a noble idea that ideally, people don't abuse power or people don't even want that much power to begin with.

It takes a lot to say, I don't even want the power.

But what you're saying is everyone says that, but then they turn and say, well, I'll take the power, but I'll be the one to use it for good.

>> Yeah, they think they'll use it for good.

They think they'll use it to stop evil forces.

But what ends up happening is it ends up corrupting.

And again, in our political landscape, building new tools for that power to be abused.

Again, some of the powers that President Trump has been abusing were also abused in the Biden administration.

I think I was on this show talking about student loan forgiveness and the Biden administration really stretched and squinted at some old laws to try to get what they wanted done.

Trump's doing the same thing with the tariffs, and he's just caring less about it.

we we have a long precedent of presidents doing this.

And the only way to resolve that is for the other branches of government to actually stop it.

And and actually, I want to back up and say not just the other branches stopping that, because that that leaves passivity.

For everyone listening today, because that's but that's not my message.

It's you need to hold other branches of government accountable to make sure that when the executive does illegal, awful, unconstitutional liberal things, that there is someone willing to stand up and put a stop to it.

>> This is where I think a number of people will say, okay, you might be diagnosing problems well, but the solution they don't agree with, and here's the grounds for that.

Instead of just reducing the power of government in general, why not just ask Congress to do its job?

Why not just ask Congress to become the equal branch of government that it is supposed to be, and then you will not see all the concentration of power in the executive.

>> I mean, that is part of it, right?

Like literally, Congress should do its job for stuff.

If Congress wants tariffs, then let them pass a law, put their name on something.

How about a war or a war?

Yeah, the war in Iran.

Like we can't even get a war power resolution passed right now.

Unfortunately, there's we the president can arbitrarily go in and spend billions of dollars, kill many, many people, and take us to war for who knows how long this commitment is going to be.

And there's no congressional authority.

And the meek response from Congress is like, well, we tried to war resolution and we couldn't get there, and we really should do something about it.

But that's not it's totally backwards anyway.

Congress isn't supposed to like, oh, tell the shake wag their finger at the president for going to war.

They're supposed to approve it.

That's supposed to happen before the president commits our resources.

Our military and American lives, to adventures overseas.

>> It is interesting the polling of Americans on what they want from their government.

And this is something else that Katherine Mangu-Ward writes about.

She says.

The good news is that Americans are increasingly waking up to the dark reality of our overbearing federal government.

A Gallup survey released in October found that 62% of Americans said the federal government had too much power.

That is up from 51% just a year ago, and it's a record high since the question was first asked since 2002.

For the first time in nearly 20 years, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say that government is too powerful.

And then she says similarly, Americans of all stripes have markedly turned against Mr.

Trump's Ice enforcement actions.

There could be a libertarian can still dream, she says.

A grassroots movement to shrink government that doesn't end up co-opted by one of the major parties.

As the Tea Party was, end quote.

So I want to ask a little bit of your historical assessment here.

I remember in Rochester covering Tea Party rallies and probably 2010.

Right.

And were you at those rallies, by the way?

>> Not in Rochester, in Rome, New York.

I was at a tea party rally.

Okay.

So I was living at the time, right.

>> So so you remember at the time and what Ward is saying here is that the Tea Party might have had libertarian roots in a movement, but it became co-opted.

Is that the story that you what's the story?

The Tea Party, as you see it?

>> Yeah, it did get co-opted.

Right.

Because we have an electoral system that's set up to be a two party system, both because it's a first past the post system and just because, like the institutional power of Republicans and Democrats, like, hardened the barriers for for entry for other folks.

And we saw that with this is why the libertarians struggled to get on the ballot even more after what Cuomo and the New York State Legislature did a few years ago.

But you sort of end up channeling into those and people end up being more loyal to the tribe than to the ideas that energize them in the first place.

Unfortunately.

>> Okay.

Did the Tea Party, did it have any lasting positive effects?

As you see it?

>> I mean, I think initially it did raise a lot of good conversations about the national debt.

On the power of the federal government, on spending and even got many Republicans to think about civil liberties.

And there's a lot of great folks elected, like Rand Paul who who's great for Justin Amash, who was a great congressman, but unfortunately could not win reelection after he voted to impeach Trump.

Peter Mehr is another one from the same district.

Mike Lee, he really changed his feathers quite a bit.

he he was.

>> Mike Lee was in the libertarian camp.

>> Yeah, he he was he was in the Tea.

>> Party camp.

He was in the Freedom Caucus camp.

>> And he's much more authoritarian these days.

>> Yeah, he really, really changed.

And so did a lot of Republicans.

They they got in line which is unfortunate.

Again, this is you know, I'm just coming of age.

This is college.

And I'm like, okay, cool.

The Republican Party is about like freedom and liberty and responsible spending.

This is what I'm all about.

And the see how much it's changed in the last ten years is disheartening.

>> The Republican.

>> Party, the Republican Party, now, the Democratic Party, they they have their own issues for sure.

And, you know, I would love to see the the liberal side of the Democratic Party make some headway.

But unfortunately, there's a lot of illiberal voices in Democratic Party, too, who, who see the same thing.

They see the rise of fascism and proto fascism and the Trump movement.

And they think, well, we have to do whatever it takes to stop it.

And so there's there's a bit of illiberalism happening on the Democratic side, side because of fear.

So the mirror image of what's happening on the Republican side.

>> All right.

Let me grab our first phone call.

This is Adam in Wayne County.

Hey, Adam, go ahead.

>> Adam, are you there?

>> Hey, hey.

Yes, I am here.

Sorry.

yeah.

So I always have a base policy, per se, when it comes to these libertarian leaning folks that claim to be.

Oh, we're so grassroots.

We're we're third party.

Well, you know, you just waste your vote, and, you know, this isn't a three party system in America.

We have two parties.

So people say pick the lesser of the evil.

Well, you're basically wasting your vote.

As I as I said again, but I'd like to offer a little bit of constructive criticism and say that you could be for issues, but you can't really push them forward until you get someone in power.

So why waste your time on Larry Green with an E or Larry Sharp?

>> Larry Sharp with an E.

>> Larry Sharp with an E?

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

so I remember listening to this guy on your show before Evan, and he's great.

And I know friends that, you know, claim to claim to cling to him, but it's really it's not productive right now.

And look where we are.

So all these.

I'm an independent.

I would I would like to say I'm a registered independent.

Always have been since I was 18 and could vote, but I don't, I don't I've been right one out of three of the last elections.

I guess, you know, and at least I at least I got a chance.

But these third party people, it would just go ahead, you know, have fun, have fun being a hipster, being cool.

>> Man.

>> Oh, it's cool.

Good, good.

It's all right.

>> A.D.

hominem attacks here, man.

>> It's a brutal first call for Kevin.

>> No, no.

>> Okay, so let me ask you a couple questions based on that.

Actually, he's, he's implying that, look, you're not going to win elections, you know, what's the point?

So tell me what the point is.

As you see it, even if you know that the party that you prefer isn't going to currently win elections.

>> So there's a couple of points.

One, we could win elections.

Libertarians have won seats around the country.

Oftentimes local seats, but there's a state seat that they had won a few years back out in Montana.

sometimes there's party defections to Justin Amash, which to the Libertarian Party, while a member of Congress.

The other part of it is if third parties start to get a lot of votes, there is a lot of incentive for the major parties to co-opt Libertarians part of their coalition.

This is what was attempted in 2024.

Actually, the the Trump campaign tried to co-opt part of the libertarian coalition by promising to free Russell Vought.

Right.

So there's a lot of people who they found that to be an important issue.

He paid lip service.

He, in fact, went to the Libertarian National Convention and tried to convince people to do that.

so that's part of it.

Is that A we could win?

B there's an opportunity to have our issues co-opted.

I understand I think it's a fair point.

And I think if you have issues that are important for you and you're able to successfully work within the major two parties and get it done and get changed and get get candidates elected, who can make your policy preferences happen, that's great.

Like, I'm I'm kind of rooting for the the abundance movement to make some headway on things like zoning reform and permit reform and being able to build stuff quicker, like I'm rooting for them.

That's not my movement, but like, I hope they're successful in doing that.

It's just I've chosen a different strategy.

>> Yeah.

And let me also say to Adam, who I understand the cynicism about third parties, because it is a big, big road in a mostly two party system.

but here's an example, Adam, that I think about a lot.

I conversations probably a decade ago with a guy named Jesse Lenny, who was with the Working Families Party, and Jesse talked about the decision that the WFP made not to run their own candidates, but to try to influence the Democratic Party and to push them to the left or to push them in more progressive ways.

When it comes to workers rights, worker protections, wages, things like that.

And the way he described it is you could run and this is a decade ago.

I don't want to speak for him now.

But, you know, he told us you could run somebody probably not going to win.

Or you could be pragmatic and try to push a party from within.

And that meant asking then Governor Cuomo, you know, where are you on certain issues?

We might endorse somebody else.

The WFP is still kind of doing that.

There was a lot of surprise in the mayoral primary in Rochester last year when they endorsed Malik Evans and not Mary Lupien, but they had their reasons for doing that.

And it's the same kind of question in congressional races, et cetera.

So a party can try to win elections, but a party can also try to push its agenda and exert influence in that way.

Fair?

>> Yeah.

That's fair, I get it.

I, you know, whatever.

I'm not exactly rooting for the WFP here, but like whatever strategy makes sense to get your policy preferences to make the community, the state, the world a better place.

>> I would think that you're rarely rooting for the WFP, but here's here's the interesting thing.

My guess is when you and I first started having conversations on this program, it was much more common for common for libertarians to say, all right, if I don't have a libertarian candidate, I'm I'm probably voting for a Republican.

Small C conservatives might be good enough here.

these days, I don't know.

I mean much it's a very different Republican Party.

So for libertarians who don't have libertarians in races, is it default Republican or is it not vote?

Is it something whoever's less authoritarian, what do you do?

>> Sometimes it's that I mean, this this is up to the individual.

I voted for all parties.

I mean, I voted for like kind of across a lot of different candidates and races.

So it sort of depends.

and I'll try to pick the less authoritarian one is usually right now down.

>> To right now.

It's about less authoritarian.

>> Yeah.

>> Less.

as you said, proto fascist.

>> Yeah.

If we don't have.

Yeah.

If we don't have a libertarian candidate running, sometimes that means voting Democrat for me.

Sometimes it means voting Republican.

it depends.

There's some state issues.

I you know, I'm not with the Democrats on and, you know, that's that's the choice you have to make.

Or I may just not vote at all in that race.

I may leave that part of the ballot blank or write someone in or something else.

It's just and that's that's how I choose to use my voice, is I don't have to play that game.

I don't have to pick the lesser of two evils if there really isn't one candidate better than the other, I will just not.

Not participate.

I'm not.

>> Going to play.

I want to ask you, coming up here about ice, I want to talk about tariffs and some of the other things that have been raised here.

We're talking to Kevin Wilson, the former chair of the Monroe County Libertarian Party and host of a Free Solution podcast, and someone who has been talking about libertarian politics for a number of years on this program.

What sparked this conversation was a piece from the editor in chief of reason magazine, a libertarian publication in which Katherine Mangu-Ward writes, we told you so.

She said, this should be the moment that libertarians are taking an ideological victory lap, not because they're happy about what they're seeing on the international and national scene.

The opposite, but because libertarians are saying on almost every issue that you talk about every day, we were on the correct side of this.

So we're kind of exploring that.

Listeners, if you want to join the program, I'll take a call here in just a second.

It's 8442958442958255263 WXXI.

If you call from Rochester 2639994.

As always, the email address connection's at wxxi.org.

You can join the chat if you're watching on the YouTube channel.

This is in Rochester on the phone next.

Hey, go ahead.

>> Okay.

Thank you for taking my call.

Yep, I've been an independent for decades now, and I just I started out as a Democrat because I guess my parents started out as Democrat and explored it.

But then I switched over and I'm out.

I'm an independent.

And the thing is, I disagree with the earlier caller.

The thing is, like, I've been called a libertarian.

I've been called a conservative.

I've been called a liberal.

And one of my extremely conservative friends who are a huge Trump supporter, but one of the best guys you ever meet in your life.

He told me, said, you know what you are.

He said, you're fiscally conservative, but socially liberal.

And I thought about it and he pretty much right.

He's right.

But here's the thing.

I don't join groups.

I don't join parties.

And the thing is that but the libertarians do have a footing.

It has legs.

But all we need are great people from there are great people in the Democratic Party.

There are great people in the Republican Party who have morals and values, ethics, principles, integrity, loyalty and standards.

And with the the libertarian needs to do is go after those people and say, look, put your principles first and come with us and let's put principles and the Constitution and the country before everything else.

That's just my spiel.

>> Okay.

Thank you.

Kevin, what do.

>> You think?

I mean, I love it.

And again, we do have candidates who have done that.

When I ran for Congress in 2020.

That's the message I tried to bring.

Didn't get quite as big of a percentage of the vote that I was hoping for.

Larry Sharpe, it certainly does that as well.

And he's running for governor again, although interestingly, he's also trying to compete in the Republican primary as well.

So we'll see how that goes.

But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of folks, I think, like you, who are frustrated when they see sometimes not the best people represented in the political parties or in the political conversation among Democrats and Republicans.

And they're hoping for a better alternative.

And that's what the libertarians try to provide, is in situations where there isn't a good alternative, where it seems like you're faced with two bad options, that there should be somewhere else people can turn if they want to represent their principles and values with someone else.

>> Jimmy Lai, thank you very much for that.

Let me get some emails that have come in here.

Rebecca in Rochester says, please stop, sir.

The last ten years, Republicans have never been the party of responsible spending.

Remember when Republicans gave us a federal government surplus?

Oh, no.

That's right.

That was the Democrats under Clinton in the 90s.

Republicans proceeded to squander that surplus.

And that was a lot more than ten years ago.

Republicans are the party of huge tax cuts for wealthy people then and now and always.

Libertarians are Republicans in disguise.

That is Rebecca.

>> you're right that the the last budget surplus came under Clinton, although there's, you know, some help with the Republicans in Congress at the time with that, too, and the Republicans ten years ago used to talk a big game about, let's cut taxes and let's cut spending.

And then when it came time to actually do it no, it didn't didn't quite happen the way that we're hoping.

I mean, there's some sequestration's and things, but they've completely given that up now is kind of my point is they don't even pay lip service to limited government.

They don't pay lip service to we need to cut the debt.

they've they've.

>> Trump talks about it.

He said that tariffs were going to eliminate the deficit and might even cut into the debt.

>> I think most of the MAGA movement is of the Steve Bannon mindset of like, well, the interest rate is still low.

So we should spend while we can like their actions speak louder than words.

And I know we talked about Doge on the show before, that wasn't a serious effort to cut government spending.

It was a cultural thing.

>> Yeah.

And I will say to Rebecca, I take the point that it's probably frustrating for Rebecca to hear journalists talk about this sort of small c conservative paradigm and then look around and be like, well, it's never been put into practice.

They had the presidency and both houses in Congress in the 2000 under Bush.

They didn't balance the budget.

They didn't cut into the debt.

They didn't do the things that they had promised that they would do.

And that was a generation ago.

So you're right.

It's not just the last ten years.

But here's where when you say libertarians or Republicans in disguise, just my analysis there, Rebecca, is libertarians have always been concerned about civil liberties.

The conversations I've had for years on this program.

Libertarians are warned about the Patriot Act, warned about government surveillance.

Libertarians have been concerned about government overreach.

you know, raids on people's homes and property and the authoritarianism in the Republican Party that is much more common now than it probably was a generation ago, does not reflect anything of what I've seen with libertarians.

I'm not doing I'm not doing PR for the Libertarian Party.

I'm trying to draw, I think, consistent ideological distinctions.

So I think Rebecca's criticism is fair, but but only insomuch as the size of government, taxation, et cetera.

What do you think?

>> Yeah, and to be fair, there are some folks who call themselves libertarians who end up kind of just being Republicans.

They vote Republican every time.

But, you know, I'd say like the Republicans also accuse us of being, you know, Democrats in disguise as well, because, you know, we do care about the civil liberties.

We do care about criminal justice reform.

We do care about the drug war all these things that Democrats also pay lip service to.

But when it comes time to actually making those reforms on things like immigration to like Obama and Biden had opportunities to make bigger reforms on immigration.

And the Democratic Congress is in there as well.

And they squandered those opportunities.

They could have limited government power.

They could have done immigration reform in a way that would have made things clearer and more effective and limited.

A future presence, ability to abuse their power and to to hurt families and immigrants.

And instead, they wasted that opportunity.

They did not successfully limit the government's power when they could have.

>> Well, let me go to a phone call from New York City.

This is Tom there.

Hey, Tom.

Go ahead.

>> Oh.

>> Hey, there.

not New York City.

Newark.

>> New York City.

Well, you know, Newark is a city.

>> Go ahead.

And I felt I had to respond because of the last Wayne County caller.

>> Okay.

>> in case unless I misunderstood him, I took him to say that having a third party is pointless because, well, we know because people are so used to two party system.

But it's interesting that when I'm out here and I listen to the local Trump supporters talk about what they want, it sounds to me like many of them really, truly are Libertarians.

I mean, they want less government.

Of course.

but they want fiscal responsibility and they want some social programs available.

Safety net programs, and they want you know, their rights and where your rights start and vice versa.

I hear that from a lot of people out here, but yet they still are solid Trump supporters for the most part.

And I don't really get it because I really think that they're they're almost more libertarian than Republican.

>> Well, Tom, I appreciate that.

I mean, some of that probably is just Identitarianism is stronger than maybe the average person thinks your identity in politics is really strong.

It's hard to change people's views on that, but that's one idea.

What do you think?

>> Well, that's true, and it feels like a betrayal to go against, like your tribe, right?

That's that's part of it.

And I mean, and then the other part is fear.

Like, what if Kamala Harris is worse?

What if all the the things I've heard about her bringing communism to America are like, true and like the only way to stop it is Trump.

And I heard so many even big l libertarians say like, oh well, it's so bad this time we got we got to vote Trump this time, because I've seen people put giant eight foot signs for our candidates in their lawns and still at the last minute like, nope, nope, going to vote for Republican or Democrat because they're so afraid of what might happen.

And this, this fear ends up being a race to the bottom.

>> Yeah, some of that is probably this is just a guess, Tom.

Some of that is probably decades of the Rush Limbaugh effect.

Rush Limbaugh every day telling millions of Americans that Democrats are anti-American, that they're actually communists, that they are there to control your lives in every aspect of it.

and that takes root when people listen day after day after day to the point where even in the future, when you know, when the wolf is at the door and you're going, we might have to let the wolf in, because, like, what else?

Like that.

That other thing could also be communism.

And you're going, well, it's powerful.

>> We're closer to communist China than we've been in decades thanks to President Trump.

So I mean, yeah, we've kind of really pulled a switcheroo there.

and but but that's but that's how a lot of people act though, is, is it's out of fear.

And again, I, I had plenty of criticisms of President Kamala Harris or her campaign rather, in President Biden.

And there's a lot of good reasons not to vote for them.

But I think those criticisms also apply to Donald Trump and his candidacy and his track record in government as well.

And to me, I'm sick of having to choose between two choices I didn't like.

And that's why I support libertarian candidates like Chase Oliver.

In the last election.

>> Well, after we take our only break, we're going to come back to your phone calls, your emails.

Kevin's here.

Kevin Wilson's getting a lot of response here.

Libertarians.

You got people talking, at least.

How about that?

>> It's great.

>> He's the former chair of the Monroe County Libertarian Party, host of A Free Solution podcast.

We're talking about the recent piece in the New York Times from the editor in chief of reason magazine, Katherine Mangu-Ward, who said, the libertarians have been right about the biggest issues of the Trump era and that they should have been listened to and that they should be listened to going forward.

Well, we're talking about what those issues are, and we'll continue with your feedback on the other side here.

Coming up in our second hour, what is it going to take for the United States to decide to end the war in Iran?

President Trump has had shifting explanations for how he defines success and for what it will take to end the war, what he wants to achieve in Iran.

Our guest next hour will talk about when conflicts end, what causes them to be prolonged, and what they're looking at in Iran.

That's next hour.

>> Support for your public radio station comes from our members and from Mary Cariola center, supporting residents to become active members of the community, from developing life skills to gaining independence.

Mary Cariola center Transforming lives of people with disabilities.

More online at.

Mary Cariola.

Org.

>> This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson Keith in Victor, I think today.

Hello, Keith.

Go ahead.

>> Evan, how are you doing?

Very good.

I think the biggest problem isn't the party.

It's the need for term limits.

Because from the moment they get elected, their main goal is to get reelected.

That's it.

You get people like Chuck Schumer who've been in politics today.

He graduated Harvard.

it's just you don't get any change when you have the same old people.

And if you get a libertarian in and people like them, they're going to keep voting them in.

You need to create political turn or turnover just to get different people with different ideas.

>> Keith.

Keith.

Thank you.

What do you think, Kevin?

>> Yeah.

I mean, I, I kind of go back and forth on term limits, but I get your point.

Is well taken.

And and because there's this thing.

Right.

Like, why why aren't we doing a lot of votes in Congress right now?

Part of it is to protect the members, right?

It's so they don't have to put their name on something controversial.

And it's a lot easier to just.

Oh, well, the executive takes care of that.

They take care of tariffs.

They take care of war.

They take care of immigration.

And we don't have to put our name on these controversial issues.

That's going to show up in an attack ad in a few months.

And again, I'm not accusing any specific member of Congress of anything, but it is a pattern that many people have observed about Congress.

And their their unwillingness to do as much legislation on stuff, in part because they're trying to protect their reelection status.

>> what do you make of the idea that, well, we need institutional experience, institutional knowledge, and, you know, term limits.

>> Would take that.

That's kind of why I go back and forth on term limits, because I think having institutional experience also does allow you to stand up to executives more effectively.

So that's I don't know where I stand on it, but I think I understand Keith's point, though, of like, we can also get churn.

And if they're not worried about Reelections because we see this right now, like the only Republicans who are saying anything about the Trump administration on any issue are folks who have decided not to run for reelection.

>> let me continue right down the line here.

So, this got a couple comments on YouTube, and I wanted to get where was that boy?

Oh, boy.

Bob here says Libertarians were the say that basically our libertarian until a loved one gets a major illness.

And then they quiet down with the whole sink or swim theory.

So what do you make of this idea that you're a libertarian until you've got someone with a catastrophic illness?

>> Yeah.

I mean, people say that about having someone commit a crime against you, too.

You're you're libertarian until someone robs your house and then you become a conservative.

And Democrats say same thing.

I don't think that's necessarily true, that the individual experience may vary, but there's there's, I think to me, room for, like a reasonable safety net in some situations and that the margins of that is what is really up for debate.

>> So I know that at the moment there are Americans who go bankrupt because they get a major injury or illness that they can't afford, that even when they're insured.

That can happen, right?

Yeah.

so do you think that we should that should be a possibility.

Do you think that having a major illness should be a reason for you to be financially ruined?

>> So I think the thing we need to think about is the trade offs of building the system that actually does this.

Right.

Like, do I think someone should be ruined?

No, of course not.

That's awful.

And we should have ways to protect that.

But like, what the conversation introduces is, oh, therefore, should government pay for all of like, medicine.

Right.

And there are different trade offs to that that I think people don't consider.

Like how do they make it work in Europe?

Well, they taxed a middle class like a lot.

And also they have wait times.

You're going to have trade offs everywhere.

We're either waiting more or you're not getting service or you're paying more.

And America decided that the trade off was we pay more for this stuff and try to fix it after the fact.

And there's some upsides to that as well as downsides.

>> What's the ideal system?

>> I mean, the ideal system is that we have no scarcity and everyone can get everything they want whenever.

But like living in reality is, I think we are.

We have a system of health care that ends up being expensive, in part because of a lot of compliance costs, a lot of regulation, a lot of lack of transparency in the the medical and the insurance process.

And I think having a process where prices are clear and there's opportunities to have support when you do have an emergency is a good combination.

I think we need to iterate on the system we have and not throw it out the window.

Basically.

>> I was going to say I too would like a unicorn.

Yeah, every day of my life.

But I would live in.

>> We all love to live in Star Trek and everything's taken.

>> Care of, but I'm challenging you not to give me the unicorn answer.

And I think what I hear you saying is no Medicare for all, no single payer.

You don't want that.

You want some version of the current system that provides better support, but also more transparency for everyone involved.

Yeah.

>> And again, we we start to see interesting and unique ways in which the free market takes care of that with like things like eye surgeries.

Right.

Like there's a lot of a lot of that that takes place outside of like the health insurance system.

And now the prices have gone down.

Access is like way better than it was 20 years ago.

Or we look at things like pharmaceuticals and we see what the Mark Cuban and what he's trying to do in terms of trying to bring access to medications.

For a lot of people.

I think there's innovative, innovative stuff happening in the market that are opportunities to give people more access, because getting more access doesn't always look like government is paying for it.

Sometimes it's innovative people thinking about different ways to connect people with medicine and services that we haven't thought of before.

>> listener on YouTube, viewer on YouTube says, hey, Kamala, voters were right about Trump as well, not just libertarians.

>> Fair.

>> That got nothing to add there.

Okay.

>> I don't know.

You're not wrong.

Yeah.

That that Donald Trump was bad.

He's worse than I thought, actually.

you know, and I'll admit that, like, I, I thought it was going to be a lot closer to the first Trump administration.

It's been worse than I thought.

>> Rick writes in to say, Evan, my real problem with libertarianism is that it comes across to me as another way to support anarchism.

As anything goes philosophy.

I would like to understand how libertarianism would address issues that need government attention or intervention, like racial discrimination, environmental dangers, and similar challenges to our collective well-being.

That's Rick.

>> Yeah.

So I mean, they're not every libertarian is an anarchist.

I'm not an anarchist.

I think there's there's a role for the state to play in a few different situations.

and one of those being like, let's talk about the environment, right?

We talk about things like negative externalities.

If you are polluting, if you are damaging someone's water, you're damaging someone's health.

Yeah, there needs to be regulation on that.

Again, not every regulation looks like the government is going to ban this industry.

Some regulations look like imposing higher costs on industries for doing that.

Sometimes it's regulation, but there's different ways of being able to solve that.

I mean, there's different things like with crime as well.

Like, yeah, if someone is trying to kill someone else or has killed someone else.

Yeah.

There's a role for the government to try to intervene in that situation and to stop people from hurting others, or I think the thing that to keep in mind is that most of us are kind of on the spectrum of liberalism, and it's just a matter of like degree, not whether or not like a government should be doing most things.

>> Well, what you should be doing.

Then here's Charlie, who says, Evan Libertarians always remind me of that kid who would sit on the side while the rest of us were doing something pretty fun and someone might get hurt.

The kid on the side, the libertarian, would sit there with his arms folded and say, I told you so.

I wish libertarians would just come out and say exactly what they stand for.

I know where I stand on the topics.

>> Libertarians never shut up about what they stand for.

Well.

>> Charlie is saying he's not sure what exactly he stands for.

>> No, I mean, it's just go, go.

>> Do the elevator pitch.

>> Go ahead.

Yeah.

So I mean, like, what we stand for is limited government.

We think that you should be able to make your choices as you wish, as long as you're not hurting people or taking their stuff.

That's the elevator pitch.

>> Okay.

so how about on the issue of let's talk about ice for a second, because in the piece that sparked this conversation, Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote in the New York Times a lot about the concern that libertarians have about Ice.

And this is part of what she says.

She says it can be no surprise that Ice officers are roaming the streets of American cities today, with an unclear mandate, military style gear, and a dire misunderstanding of the constitutional limits, limits on their behavior.

An Ice officer was recently caught telling a protester who tried to film him, you raise your voice.

I erase your voice.

Do you agree with her that ice is behavior is not just thuggish, but unconstitutional?

>> Yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

We the the behavior from Ice officers is totally unacceptable.

And it's not merely a training issue.

It's a mandate coming from the executive that has no perceived constraints on its power to be able to act on what they think of as their immigration mandate.

Now, as they've started to do this, Americans have woken up and seen like, oh, this is what power exercise against us actually looks like.

And I thought it was just going to be some other people, some distant, like illegal immigrants somewhere that I didn't have to think about that was causing problems somewhere else.

And what they're seeing is like, oh no, this is my friends, my neighbors, my coworker who has a visa.

That's what they're seeing.

They're seeing what power looks like, exercise against us.

And that's the type of thing that needs to be limited.

And when I say limited, I mean Congress should not fund that.

Like we'll start with that.

Congress should not fund it.

They keep doing it anyway.

and there should be explicit limits on what immigration enforcement could do in the United States and consequences for officers who do things like kill innocent protesters or detain American citizens, or detain legal residents of any other situation where they have people in jail for weeks in completely unacceptable conditions, like there needs to be some accountability for that.

And that's where I come back to.

Should the government do some things?

Yeah, sometimes government officials should go to jail for abusing American citizens and for people who are here.

>> Two of the loudest voices of Republicans who've been elected to Congress, who are speaking out against Ice, have been Congress members who left Congress after the Trump movement was ascendant.

That's Adam Kinzinger and Justin Amash, as you said, Justin Amash, who became a libertarian.

so they're not even in Congress right now.

Rand Paul in the Senate has been a consistent voice against the authoritarian sort of behavior that we're seeing.

Otherwise, we are not seeing Republicans in any meaningful way challenge what Ice is doing.

And in many cases, they're cheering.

Ice.

Has that surprised you?

I'm not trying to tee up an easy question.

Let me put this another way.

>> Yeah, sure.

>> This is the actual situation in which we see masked agents, armed agents of the government who are not police officers.

They're agents of the federal government, and they've killed two Americans in the streets who are not posing a threat.

And they are telling people, according to conservative judges, all kinds of unconstitutional stuff every day.

You're not allowed to film police or agents of the government, which you are.

You know, they can knock you down and they can put you in a car without any process.

They can lock you up as long as they want.

They're not allowed to do those things.

They're doing those things.

Is it surprising to you that so few Republicans are objecting to that?

>> Yeah, it bums me out.

and again, many of these Republicans are correctly worried about, like, jackbooted thugs in the streets, like violating their rights.

I'm like, okay, yeah, no.

Heck yeah.

Like, let's let's do something about that.

And then when they have the opportunity to wear the boots, unfortunately, they're taking it way farther than any recent government has done.

>> Does this go back to your point at the beginning, you believe that in general, people who see what's going on with Ice are appalled by it, unless it's their team and the people who say that they would never do this most of the time would do that.

If it's their team wearing the boots sometimes.

>> Yeah, again, I think the Democrats will forgive a lot of stuff when it's their team wearing the boots as well.

and we can talk about some specific examples, but I don't want to lump in all Republicans because there's a lot of Republicans who see this stuff and like, oh, wait, I was talking about how that was bad a few years ago.

And they as much as people tend to be loyal to tribes, they also want to be internally consistent as well.

And I think most folks want individual liberty.

They don't want to see our government acting like a third world dictatorship, and they want to put an end to it.

And what they're hoping is that the Republicans just like, snap out of it and be like, oh yeah, we've gone too far here.

Like, yeah, immigration.

Like crackdown.

Sure.

But like, let's, let's, you know, keep it within constitutional bounds.

I think that's what everyone's just kind of hoping for.

But like, you can't just hope for that.

You have to hold people accountable when they're not doing anything to fix the problem.

>> here's a different Bob who says that the says even the left leaning members of your audience today seem to think that libertarians are just Republicans.

They've said libertarians are Republicans in disguise.

As an actual Republican, I can tell you that libertarians are nowhere near Republicans on immigration.

Many libertarians want open borders.

Do you want open borders?

>> I mean, pretty close, honestly.

But it's and I know, like, this is this is where we really are different from Republicans.

And I think it should be as simple and straightforward as possible to do.

Come here, live here, have a job start a family.

You know, I again, I can't get myself in the mindset like I met and hung out with many immigrants in Rochester who are visa holders, people who became citizens, people who are still permanent residents.

And they're just trying to do the same things the rest of us are trying to do.

They're just trying to have a job.

They're just trying to have a family.

They're just hanging out, building community, doing the same stuff the rest of us do.

And why would you want to send those folks home?

I don't get it.

They make our country a good place.

>> Okay, I'm not asking about sending people home, though.

I'm talking about policy going forward.

Should there be any limits on immigration.

>> So the process should be straightforward is what the limit should be like.

You should go in, declare yourself, have all your paperwork accurate right to the best of your ability.

There's refugee status.

There's a process for that.

What we've done instead is we've made it nearly impossible to be a refugee in the United States.

We've made it nearly impossible for someone to navigate the system.

And that's why you see folks who, like, have been married and living in the U.S.

for decades and are trying to go through green card process and then get deported suddenly when they show up to their legal immigration hearing.

Like, that's the type of stuff I think most people, including most Republicans, don't want stop.

Like, no, we want the system to be fair and we want the we want people who are coming over not declaring themselves sneaking over, like doing that.

Like we want that to stop.

I think that's what most people want.

Stop.

And even me, I'm like, okay, yeah, sure.

If you're if we have an easy process, you're not going through.

Yeah, there should be some consequences for that, right?

But right now it's so difficult that a lot of people who even follow all the rules get caught up in that system where they think they're coming over legally, they think they've done everything right, and they're still getting deported.

They're getting ripped out of their homes, ripped away from their families.

And that's the thing that's unjust.

I think most again, even your average Republicans like, oh, we should probably have a fair system and the loudest voices online are the ones who are cheering it on.

And I think that's that's actually a minority of folks.

But they they sure do take up a lot of talking space.

>> In general.

Then your view, and you think many libertarians view as immigration makes this country better and we want more of it.

>> Yeah.

>> Not less.

>> Yeah I.

>> Do okay.

>> I think I think, you know what?

We'll expand on that slightly.

America is a great place.

It's so awesome that everyone wants to come here.

And I think that's great.

People who are excited to come to America because they think America is a great place.

Cool.

Let's let's bring all those folks over here, and especially a lot of them are smart, and they want to do cool things and build businesses.

Yeah, bring those folks over.

>> Deborah says I don't believe the American people made a choice to have insurance and medical care become a profit, a for profit system.

That was capitalism.

And the government officials who are beholden to corporations.

Medicine should be not for profit and not not should not be profit driven, period.

When you scare people with taxes on the middle class and don't explain where it's going, you do a disservice to the community.

Nowhere is perfect.

But the people in Norway and Scandinavia are pretty happy.

Deborah says.

>> Yeah, but they pay like 60% of their income in taxes.

Again, I.

>> I think he's right on the happiness rankings.

I think they're happier than we are.

>> They like it again.

There's trade offs.

I think a lot of times the conversation ends up being disingenuous, where we think like, oh, well, just the rich people will pay for it.

Like, no, that's not what's happening in Scandinavian countries.

Everyone pays for it, and that's fine.

But be honest about it, right?

Like there's there's trade offs for that.

It gets expensive.

Costs are controlled even less.

You just don't see the costs of that because it's all covered by the government.

And their systems are in financial jeopardy frequently because of this issue.

Right.

So like again, I'm open to that debate.

I'll talk about it.

But like there is a trade off to that.

>> I mean, like part of the trade off is if you break your leg, you don't lose your house.

That could be pretty good.

>> Yeah, that's part that that is part of it is, is you do that.

It might take months sometimes to get treatment.

and in sometimes you do actually still have to pay.

A lot of people don't understand that too.

But it depends on the specific country.

So we have to talk about the specific thing.

and again, in the United States the trade off is like, well, you pay you might pay more out of pocket.

Most people have insurance, but you might not.

but there are different ways to be able to access that.

>> So here's one that I don't know anything about.

Linda writes to say, why would or why do the libertarians want Ross Ulbricht, basically a narcotics dealer, to be freed?

>> so I'll I'll caveat this is I don't feel very strongly with this, but what they felt is that Ross Ulbricht had created a system that was essentially a fair market that existed outside of government control.

>> Who is Ross Ulbricht?

>> So he had built Silk Road.

Silk road was basically an internet marketplace where you could buy anything.

So, I mean, sometimes it was just normal stuff.

Computers, whatever.

Sometimes there's trading bitcoin, sometimes people would buy heroin.

And the thing he was accused of was related to trying to pay for an assassination.

So yeah, but there were a lot of libertarians who thought that the only reason he was sent to jail was because the government didn't like having something outside of their control, and that was too dangerous.

So that's that's what a lot of folks feel about it.

I kind of ambivalent on it.

>> You don't have strong views on Russell Vought.

>> No, I.

>> Don't okay.

last couple of minutes here.

The question is where this goes forward here and in Katherine Mangu-Ward piece, you know, as she notes, that a lot of Americans in general say they want less power in government.

The question becomes, who might be the kind of political leaders they don't have to be Libertarians.

they don't have to be Republicans, don't have to be Democrats.

But who is on the scene?

Who embodies those values that gets you excited?

Are there is there anybody.

>> I mean, so, of course in terms of actual politicians, there's there's a few that I like, although there's still some issues.

Again Justin Amash, Rand Paul I'll give you a couple Democrats to the governor of Colorado.

>> Jared Polis.

Yeah, he's definitely more in that direction.

>> Yeah.

Which, you know, I think he's the only Democrat I've seen retweet the Libertarian Party before, but but yeah, so there's there's a few folks out there, both in the Democratic and Republican Party who who do give me hope, but I think it's I'm not sitting here waiting for a hero either.

Right.

Like like it's we can't just hope that someone comes in and save us.

We can't just hope that, like, Congress is going to do their job like, you know, and we just sit here and wait for that to happen.

Like you need to get out and write to your members of Congress about specific legislation to hold the executive branch accountable, like war powers resolutions, like there's an interesting bill a while ago.

I think the article one act that required emergencies to sunset after 30 days.

If a president doesn't declare it tariff clawbacks, things like that.

Like we need to start demanding better of our members of Congress, our senators, and at the New York State level to start to think about how do we have liabilities when we're very dependent on the federal government?

If the federal government funds a lot of state activities, what does that mean in terms of like how we can operate independently of a federal government that might be rogue or not acting in our best interest?

>> I didn't even get to tariffs and we're going to get the music here.

So 30s or less here for people who live in small communities who lost their manufacturing and they see the president say these tariffs are going to onshore, more manufacturing back then.

That's what we're going to do.

What do you say to them?

>> he's lying to you.

That's that's what it is.

It's not going to happen.

unfortunately, things are just changing.

Like he's made you a promise that he's not able to keep.

So big thing, though.

Cast a ring into the fire.

We don't need all this executive power.

>> Back to the Lord of the rings.

>> Heck, yeah.

No, I just read it again recently, so I'm excited about it.

But cast it into the fire.

We don't need executive power concentrated and bring power back to to the people.

>> Where can people see more of your work or hear more of your work?

Kevin Wilson.

>> follow me on Twitter at Kevin Wilson.

Grok I occasionally do podcasts on a free solution to follow me there.

>> former chair of the Monroe County Libertarian Party.

come back and talk anytime.

I really appreciate it.

>> Love it.

Thank you for.

>> Having me.

Thanks very much.

More Connections coming up in just a moment.

>> This program is a production of WXXI Public Radio.

The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of this station.

Its staff, management or underwriters.

The broadcast is meant for the private use of our audience.

Any rebroadcast or use in another medium, without express written consent of WXXI is strictly prohibited.

Connections with Evan Dawson is available as a podcast.

Just click on the link at wxxinews.org.