The Agenda and Campaign Statement of

Leland Thomas Faegre

These are the times that try men’s souls. Arguably more true today than when written by the gifted revolutionary, Thomas Paine. And yet, have we learned anything from the time these words became immortal?

When queried by media and others of my Congressional platform, I answer from the point of view of the individual. The state has no answers. It has only an awesome collective power granted to it by the individual to make decisions in its behalf.

And what then, has the individual benefited by this special interest? The ultimate special interest. Have we lost our senses or our minds, that we work from the beginning of the calendar year through the first or second week of May to pay for this monstrosity?

Not that very long ago, my now 10 year-old daughter brought up the subject of monsters from time to time, and I assured her that there was no such thing as a monster.   That was sufficient then, but soon it will be apparent that while hideous and selfish monsters of slime and silver screen are myth, a monster of our own creation has been stealing from, lying to, and killing its own citizens. Or should I say subjects?

And just how has the average American citizen participated in the creation of this monster? Obviously, by entrusting government to make decisions that they themselves can and should make for themselves. Decisions that the framers of our Republic intended them to make for themselves.

And now I transition my remarks to the platform of my campaign, and more importantly to the platform of the Libertarian Party. Unlike the Republicans and Democrats, (the Republicrats), the Libertarian Party does not have myriad schemes to spend your money. In fact, we have only one scheme; to return to you, your right to keep what you earn.

And just how do we intend to do that? The best and most direct way is to eliminate the mechanism that steals legally from you. I said legally, not constitutionally.

I advocate the abolition of the Income Tax.

Where does the income tax originate? While academia will likely argue over it, it was published generally to the population of Europe in 1848. It was called the Manifesto. And in the Manifesto, among its 10 measures is plank number 2 which reads:

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

It was, and remains the most important mechanism for the theft and redistribution of your wealth. It serves the special interests of politicians who create and live from the trough of the welfare state, the plethora of alphabet agencies, and the monstrous unspeakable abuse it wields against its own citizens--or should I say subjects?

Now I would like to call your attention to the threat to civil liberties known now by the expression, War on Drugs. It is an obvious fraud.

There is not now, nor has there ever been a War on Drugs. What there has been, is an elaborate pretense of political duplicity; the intent of which is not to prevent drug abuse (which it in fact encourages), but to create a climate of distrust, fear, hostility, alienation, divisiveness, and violence in our society. Drug prohibition is in reality a war of cultural prejudice waged primarily against the young, the poor, and the socially disaffected to the advantage of the elected elite, privileged few.

The storm troopers aren’t in your living room yet, but why bother, when the government can take your house. Just be criminal enough to have kids who grow marijuana in your backyard, and Janet Reno owns the joint.

Those of us who advocate the end to Drug Prohibition understand that drug abuse is a reality--a serious reality with which every American should be concerned. However, the current policy of prohibition and criminalization of drugs does not reduce drug abuse or the harm that drugs cause.

Who said this?

And from an article in the New York Times written by Nobel Prize winning, Milton Friedman, "drug prohibition makes drugs exorbitantly expensive and highly uncertain in quality. A user must associate with criminals to get the drugs, and many are driven to become criminals themselves to finance the habit. Needles, which are hard to get, are often shared, with the predictable effect of spreading disease."

If this isn’t stupid enough, can it be any more abusive?

The percentage of asset forfeiture where the property owner is never charged with a crime--yet the government can and usually does keep the property: 80%

The race of individuals whose property is seized in airports and on highways, because they fit the police profile of a drug courier: 75% to 90% Black or Hispanic--Forfeiting Our Property Rights, by Rep. Henry Hyde, 1995

And this from the Wall Street Journal, January 14, 1993: "A forfeiture case is something out of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ where the rule is punishment first, trial later."

In fact, The War on Drugs is duplicitous and exacerbates the problem far beyond the dangers of the drugs themselves, by making criminals of drug users, and transforming our society into a police state.

I will no longer vote for, or advocate any political party or politician which utilizes the War on Drugs as a get votes strategy. Anyone who does this is simply an accomplice to totalitarianism.

I digress now to perhaps the most important issue facing the American Republic:

Education.

The elimination of the Marxist income tax will transform our social requirement for both parents to work, enabling one parent to remain in the home for the first time in a generation, and permit our precious children to be educated ideally, in the home.

Again from the Communist Manifesto, is this verbatim transcription:

"Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty."

"But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social."

And yet again from the Communist Manifesto is plank 10:

Free education for all children in public schools.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is what has happened:

Back in 1983, members of the Reagan-era National Commission on Excellence in Education wrote that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war."

Little has changed since the commission’s report, "A Nation at Risk," was released. Despite a decade and a half of rhetoric, from "basics" to "merit pay"to "standards"-- not to mention a one-third increase in the amount spent on each pupil in public school.

It is by now familiar news that American high school seniors rank 19th out of 21 countries in math and science scores.

Per-pupil spending on public education has more than doubled since 1983. Professor John Lott of the University of Pennsylvania has presented evidence that across countries, expenditures on public schooling are positively correlated with levels of totalitarianism.

At the California Teachers Association’s Equity and Human Rights Conference, Lee Berg, of the National Education Association’s, Center for the Revitalization of Urban Education, discussed the internal campaign to swing teacher union members away from support of Proposition 226 (which would require unions to annually obtain their members’ permission to use any portion of their dues for political purposes).

Mr. Berg warned the audience that after the passage of 226, school vouchers and tuition tax credits would soon follow. He proceeded to alert everyone to the dangers of vouchers. "When education is not public," he said, "we no longer have the ability to control what is taught and what is not taught." Exactly right Mr. Berg. We want to end the State Monopoly on Education.

I digress now to the role of the Libertarian Party. By far the biggest objection by allies to voting Libertarian, is not the usual controversial issues we raise. By far our biggest problem is the wasted vote argument.--The idea that if you vote for someone who can not win, then that vote does not count.

Remember, if we keep voting the way we have been voting, we will keep getting what we have been getting. The history of third parties in the United States is that they serve as the vanguard for new ideas. If they start to draw votes, one or both of the two big parties steal their ideas. We welcome that.

The most successful third party in the 20th century was the Socialist Party. While never winning any significant elections, their small but growing vote totals were a threat to the Democrats. Thus the Democrats, and then later the Republicans, adopted piecemeal every major tenet of the 1916 Socialist Party platform.

And what do the pundits have to say about us?

"The party to watch in the 21st century may well turn out to be the Libertarians."

--David Broder, Washington Post

"Libertarians have all the good ideas."

--Hugh Downs, ABC News

When Republican Malcolm Wallop from Wyoming quit the United States Senate in 1994, his bitter departing remarks describing the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans are worth quoting here: "If the Democrats proposed a bill to burn down the White House, the Republicans would immediately submit a compromise measure to phase it in over three years."

And so it has been...In a recent survey of 330 top federal officials by the Pew Research Center, with the National Journal, 81% of career bureaucrats and 77% of Clinton appointees say the public doesn’t know enough about issues to form wise opinions on them. Of lawmakers polled, 47% agree and 31% don’t.

So how long will it take for Americans to realize that status quo parties and platforms will not solve these prescient problems. The Libertarian Party is right. The lessor of two evils is still evil and solves nothing.