Congressional Candidates – Gigi Bowman: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Clean Food

By Liberty Candidate 2011,

Daniel de Gracia

HAWAII, May 31, 2012 — As congressional candidates square off in primaries across America, one of the most frequently invoked justifications for choosing one party personality over another is “business experience.” We’ve all heard the campaign tagline a million times: “So-and-so’s years of experience in business will help turn around our government and put our nation back on track.” But does experience running a company really make a candidate more qualified for office?

Thinking Carefully About Policy and Profits

In the early days of the Republic, America was a sparsely populated, largely agrarian nation. Legislators often served short careers in office and usually introduced inchoate laws – that is, bills they expected to pass on an as-needed basis. Congressional workload was light to moderate, with most legislators using family members as staff and the topics which came before committees were ones which could be resolved with minimal technical experience.

Today, Congress is a vastly different institution from its origins. Immense expertise on a dizzying array of matters is in high demand as Congress insists on legislating increasingly complex matters ranging from domestic economics to international affairs to even advanced scientific research.

The rise of the “2,000-page bill” introductions along with an already confusing myriad of existing laws, regulations, agency traditions and licensing regimes often force legislators to depend on lobbyists and expert staff members to know what needs to be done. Amidst this chaotic environment, it is argued that a candidate with prior business experience will be the best to handle the so-called “gridlock” of Washington and serve America.

The problem, however, with candidates with business backgrounds – especially those with big business experience – is that running a company well is not the same thing as running a government. In a business, profit-seeking is the core of any successful company. While a company that expands its production and increases its profits may be extremely popular among shareholders, a government that increases its tax revenues and upgrades its operations using “business methods” is essentially becoming better at stealing from taxpayers and more efficient at bossing people around.

As the ancient Greek author Thucydides famously warned in History of the Peloponnesian War, “as the power of Hellas grew, and the acquisition of wealth became more an object, the revenues of the states increasing, tyrannies were by their means established almost everywhere.” Said another way: Want government to help you and your friends get rich? Then use government to rig the market!

Consider this: In a total free market absent any government, no taxes exist; therefore, where revenues minus costs equal profits, money made by businesses goes to paying wages (purchase of labor) and investing in more business (purchase of capital).

Since a free market also has no government-controlled central bank to artificially dilate or contract the money supply through interest rates, the amount of money in the market is relatively stable and combined with increasing efficiency of production, the more “free” a market is, the cheaper products get and ultimately, profits fall.

Continued

Liberty Candidates have made it into the big time! Elizabeth Dworkin of Bloomberg/Businessweek has written a story including many of our liberty candidates like Karen Kwaitkowski, Tisha Casida, Calen Fretts and more! Gigi Bowman met up with the author and some of our Liberty Candidates during Philly Phreedom, the Ron Paul Rally on April 22. In the middle of a storm Elizabeth Dworkin might have found more Liberty than she’d imagined 4,500 people with umbrella’s in the rain to hear the Presidential Candidate who has brought so much inspiration to all the liberty Candidates 🙂

~Gigi Bowman, President of Liberty-Candidates.org; libertycandidates.com

Ron Paul’s Torchbearers

By Elizabeth Dworkin on April 26, 2012

Karen Kwiatkowski, a Republican candidate for Congress in Virginia, rarely passes up an opportunity to scold Washington politicians about runaway defense spending, which she says is an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars that does little to make Americans safer. Halfway across the country, Tisha Casida, a Colorado Independent, says she’ll push to end the drug war and legalize marijuana if she’s elected to the House. In Florida, Calen Fretts, a Libertarian seeking to unseat a veteran Republican congressman, promises that if he’s elected he’ll begin working to abolish the U.S. Federal Reserve. “As people increase the size and scope of government,” Fretts says, “there’s got to be a few of us to resist it.”

These candidates have two things in common: All are long shots seeking office for the first time. And all were inspired to run by the same man—Ron Paul.

After 12 terms in the House, Paul, who is 76, says he’ll retire at year’s end. Though he gamely insists he can still defeat Mitt Romney and capture the Republican nomination, his presidential runs have always been about forcing other candidates, and the public, to pay attention to his libertarian arguments for eliminating most taxes, closing federal agencies, bringing U.S. troops home from overseas, legalizing drugs, outlawing official secrecy, dismantling the Fed, returning to the gold standard, and generally getting the government to get out of the way.

If forcing his don’t-tread-on-me, minimalist philosophy into the mainstream is the benchmark, Paul can claim victory and return to Texas a happy man. The professional political class may ridicule him as an eccentric kook leading a cantankerous army of potheads who invade chat rooms with ALLCAPS rants about government overreach. (And no doubt there’s something to that—the most worshipful Paul evangelists can be hard to stomach.) But listening to his rivals in the GOP debates demand that the Fed be audited and the Departments of Energy and Education be shuttered, it’s clear that many of Paul’s positions, once considered extreme, are now routine Republican talking points—and that his influence over conservative politics greatly outweighs his low poll rankings and back-of-the-pack primary returns. “I believe our time has come,” says Paul, who quickly tempers this uncharacteristic display of optimism. “It’s still going to be a knock-down dragged-out fight.”

continued:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-25/ron-pauls-torchbearers#disqus_thread