The New York Times recently interviewed Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver.
Libertarian Candidates Can Change Presidential Outcomes. What Does the New Nominee Believe? New York Times | Jane Coaston:
June 17, 2024 - "In 2016 the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, received more votes than any of the party’s other candidates in history and the most of any third-party candidate since Ross Perot.... In 2022 the hard-line Mises Caucus took control of the Libertarian Party... But in a major surprise, the winner of the party’s [2024] presidential nominating process was not the Mises Caucus’s favorite but Chase Oliver, a 38-year-old gay antiwar activist who had left the Democratic Party. I spoke with Mr. Oliver about what libertarianism means to him today, [and] how he plans to fight for independent votes this year.... This interview has been edited for length and clarity...."
"Chase Oliver: Libertarianism to me has always meant the freedom for peaceful people to make their own decisions about their own lives without government interference. I’ve always said that 'if you’re living your life and not using force, fraud, coercion, theft or violence, your life’s your life, your body’s your body, your business is your business, and your property is your property; it’s not mine, and it’s not the government’s'.... [A]s somebody who has actually embraced truly classical liberal values, I’ve understood that there will be people who live more conservatively than I do. That’s fine, so long as they don’t seek to use the force of government upon me. Just as I’m happy to let anybody live their life as outside of the norm and outside of the box as they want to, so long as they don’t seek to use the force of government on me....
Chase Oliver. Claire Merchlinsky, NY Times.
"I think the pandemic certainly solidified many of the libertarians’ view that there isn’t a crisis that government won’t take advantage of to rob us of our liberty. This was certainly proven out during the Covid years. Whenever we see a crisis happening, the first thing we need to look to is, 'How is the state going to exploit this for their benefit, their power and their gain?' — many times at the expense of the average working person. We saw this with millions of small businesses disappearing. We saw this with the callous lockdowns that prevented people from even saying goodbye to their loved ones as they were passing away....
"I’m from Atlanta, where we have the Stop Cop City movement. So I believe the criminal justice and police accountability movement is still very much alive and well where I’m at. And I still see many people wanting to have a level playing field for individual citizens against government when it comes to all areas of criminal justice ... because overpolicing hasn’t ended. The abuses that we see from law enforcement that need to be held accountable have not stopped....
"Let’s expand past cannabis to the total end of the war on drugs, which creates much of the violence we see in our neighborhoods. But really, the next hill to climb is going to be therapies like psilocybin therapy, MDMA therapy, ketamine. These are therapies that have been shown in a medical setting to absolutely help people suffering from mental health issues, including PTSD for our veterans....
"I’m one for a less interventionist foreign policy, one that exports our values with free markets and free trade as opposed to bombs and bullets. But Donald Trump isn’t for that, either, because he’s a hard-core economic protectionist who doesn’t know what free trade is or how it’s beneficial to the marketplace.... The only true free-market and peace candidate is the Libertarian Party candidate. That’s me in this race, and I look forward to earning the votes of the antiwar movement....
"I think we need to understand that there’s a broad swath of the electorate that is, broadly speaking, quite libertarian. We just have to be able to communicate our values in a way that they can resonate with, that understands them.... We want to help the poor. We just don’t think the state’s the best to do that. We want to see more alternatives in the marketplace and more choice of innovation in the marketplace. And we certainly know the state’s not going to achieve that....
"What I’m stressing in my campaign and I think we need to stress more as a party is that we actually value the liberty of other people because that is what gives us our individual liberty. If we’re not fighting for the liberty of people who look differently or who live differently or who worship differently or who love differently, then we are not fighting for our liberty, because when one person is not free, we are not free. So I’m hoping that people can see the empathy and, frankly, the love that comes out of the message of liberty from my campaign. Because if we’re not fighting for other people, we’re not fighting for ourselves."
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/opinion/chase-oliver-trump-biden.html
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