I've probably had more trepidation deciding what I was going to include and what I was not going to include in my 30 minutes and of course being somebody who believes in the rule of law, I'll stop at 30 minutes and I guess Mark can decide to get out the Ludwig von Mises hook and pull me to the side and say time for questions or I can talk a little bit longer.
The title was How I Won the Gubernatorial Election, which is going to be a tall order.
I can talk about small victories along the way, but I thought Mark and I had agreed to change it to how I took the goober out of gubernatorial politics in Alabama.
It's probably nice to just start out with thanks.
The Von Mises Institute is certainly a sanctuary to come back to where you can talk about liberty and not have to dodge eggs and other barbs and slings and arrows.
It actually beckons back to the first brown bag that I ever attended.
There was a discussion about going back and forth between, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans and big government, small government, and sort of sheepishly first chimed in.
I believe it's the first thing I ever said at the von Mises Institute is I said well it's not really a pendulum, it's a ratchet, right?
And you've basically got the Republicans that have been willing to take sort of the power pole and you know really do the things that guys like Lincoln and Hoover do
and then sort of Wilson and FDR understand the easiest thing is just to have the non-power pole to bring it back and you just keep ratcheting to bigger and bigger government
Which I promptly saw Lew Rockwell, you know, crack one of those nice wry smiles, which I took as a sign that, yeah, maybe this guy really gets it, but you never know with Lew, it might have been just gas, we'll have to ask him.
I'm afraid to find out what in fact it may have been.
So perhaps the best place to start is just with the numbers at the end of the election.
The Democrat received 29 percent, the Republican 29 percent, and I received 2 percent, which was a record.
By what percent? 2 percent. What a surprise.
There are a lot of folks who, especially when you're one of the Leviathan parties, that seem to want to claim property rights to voters.
How dare this libertarian come in and take votes from us as if they have a stake to acclaim to it.
claim to it and of course what was nice and one of the victories of course that I'll talk about along the way is we offered an alternative and for those who actually knew there was an alternative out there to vote for came out and voted and you know it's pretty clear that's where the two percent was derived and the other victory perhaps if you look at it in nominal terms the campaign beat the margin of victory by over tenfold now of course as most of you know whenever somebody dares
is to, you know, wave their fist at the Leviathan parties immediately in their special session
that was supposed to solve the problems of education.
They got nothing done with respect to education, but they managed to change the ballot access
laws to be even more restrictive, and I guess, you know, part of the jokes that I'll hit
along the way is, well, your local legislator here, Mike Hubbard, was the one that sort
The Federal Reserve authored making sure that the laws got changed to be more restrictive and one of the great things that an earlier campaign of mine discovered was the way to get signatures was just to go at the primaries where you had everybody that you knew was showing up was likely to be a registered voter and we lowered the barrier so now they wanted to make sure that you had to have things in deadlines before the primaries which is what got the Republicans in trouble and for those of you who don't remember what I'm referring to George Bush pretty narrowly
to be a write-in candidate in Alabama because of these ridiculous laws that they had put in to restrict ballot access, but of course, when you're one of the Leviathan parties, you just change the law at the last minute to make sure that you don't have to adhere to the laws that you're making.
Taking the goober out of gubernatorial politics was a fun catch line.
It's pretty clear that we say that at our own peril.
To think that governments run poorly is just a foolish thing.
Governments run incredibly well, they're extremely efficient,
once you understand what the objective function is.
We tend to suffer from the illusion that, you know,
they're out there to generate public good and do what their stated purpose is.
running for Congress was much easier because when folks said what do you stand for I'd say you know go pick up article 1 section 8 of the Constitution read those enumerated powers that's what I stand for and if that's not you know listed there then I'm not interested in doing it well why I came to be as the gubernatorial candidate and I make no remorse whatsoever I was delighted and it was an honor to be the face that they put
at the top of the ticket.
I know you're probably wondering, couldn't they come up with a better face than that?
But certainly, I thought that I was pretty well-placed to head the party and go out and champion liberty
and the discourse that it takes to champion it as a candidate.
When I went to my candidate interview up in Birmingham before the executive committee,
I wanted to run again for third U.S. House.
And the discussion got, you know, sort of a little bit more heated, a little bit more heated.
And they finally said, well, you know, we really wanted you to run for governor.
And so I decided to go ahead and take the plunge and run for governor.
And I didn't feel as bad about leaving the third district behind because it went into the capable hands of Mr. George Crispin here in attendance.
And we actually had a pretty good lineup of candidates.
I'm very proud of the list of candidates we had.
and I considered a victory. I think in the end we fielded just under 70 candidates.
We've got one of our other candidates here with, well, should I say retired Sergeant Tim or at the moment,
soon to perhaps be unretired sergeant who was our sheriff's deputies candidate, got Dick Clark who was PSC.
And Mark, you decided to not do anything that last round.
How did I let you off the hook?
I just must not have punched you enough.
Well, too bad Professor Alt isn't here,
so I could give him credit for why I've decided
to address it in this fashion.
But he always likes to cite George Will's three Rs.
Well, it was pretty clear, once you
get immersed in Alabama politics,
and what the three Rs are.
Religion, race, redistribution.
Now of course those of you who actually know the game, right?
The first two are just inputs for the last one,
which is the one that they're really interested in.
It's amazing.
I should have coined the term earlier,
but I'm gonna go ahead and throw it out now
and please feel free to use it as many times
and as often as you'd like.
Two wrongs make a right and a left. Nowhere is that more true in Alabama politics.
The information machine is quite well-oiled, I'm assuming, in Alabama's everywhere else.
But before we even announced our candidacy, the atheists crashed our party, which at first outset I thought was fine.
You know, when they came and discussed, well, we'd like to run some candidates and, you know, we're atheists. Do you care? No, I don't care.
I care less, you know, what religion you are.
And promptly, the candidates that were part of this ticket started using the libertarian platform to espouse their religious beliefs.
And we hammered them, and we hammered them, and we hammered them and said, listen,
Listen, all the stuff you're talking about that deals with what the Alabama Constitution says, right?
We're here to promote life, liberty, define and force defend the peaceable transfer of property.
Great. You will not use the Libertarian Party as a platform,
just like I would never dream of using the Libertarian Party as a platform to advance my religious beliefs.
Well, Andy Barnett once said, never wrestle with a pig.
You just get dirty and the pig likes it.
Well, after three rather heated exchanges,
most of them thankfully by email
and being charged with being bigots
and all that other sort of stuff,
the atheists decided to finally find
that they weren't gonna be very effective
with espousing their religion
through the Libertarian Party.
Now this is one of the important victories that many folks in the party did not see as
such.
It was a victory that we allowed folks to come and use our party apparatus to advance
liberty.
It's also a victory that we policed our ranks and said we are not going to allow you to
to Use the Libertarian Party to Advance Non-Libertarian Ideas.
Now once again, as I started out thanking you for being invited back to the sanctuary,
the Ludwig von Mises Institute, I think, has made a very good concerted effort in policing
their ranks.
You're here to champion the cause of liberty.
It's an incredibly important thing to do.
Well, for some of you who want me to talk a little bit more about ballot access laws,
here's my abbreviated version.
The reason why all these groups were coming and sort of wanting to use the Libertarian
Party was one of our prior election cycle candidates got over 20 percent of the vote,
which gave you statewide ballot access.
So thanks to that one candidate, and we had to fight quite a bit to even make sure that
The Leviathan Parties even recognized that it was in fact within the purview of the state law to allow us access to our ballot.
We could field candidates statewide.
Along the way I'm going to throw tidbits out.
Here's one of the first.
It would probably be a good idea to get some of the folks here at the von Mises Institute
To put together a very concerted, concise, logical formula for ballot access laws.
Now my first stab at it is the following, and I think it's pretty simple.
To provide elections, you can make an argument, is a function of government, is a public good?
Okay, let them pay the fixed cost of the election.
The marginal cost should be paid by the candidates. Economists love marginal cost pricing. So,
instead of having these ridiculous ballot access laws where we're wasting money and
time going out there and getting signatures, instead of advancing our ideas, just pay.
If it's the marginal cost to put a name on the ballot in a statewide race is $15,000,
$15,000, fine, each candidate pay that $15,000, whether they're one of the Leviathan parties
or whether they're the anarchist party or the panther party or the constitution party,
but it all be the same for each party.
Now what's nice about that for folks who think about issues like that, you're using that
money to offset the cost of an election, a user fee, what a novel idea.
And of course, that's the worst nightmare for the politicians because they like using
ballot access laws as a barrier to entry.
Well, the three R's.
We decided to announce our candidacy and several of the other candidates that had already agreed
to Announce in January on the Capitol steps.
If this was a Ken Burns film, you know how they'll do the little ditties at the beginning.
It's just got a catchphrase or whatever.
This would sort of be, you know, maybe Cold Day in Hades or Snowballs Chance in Hades,
something like that.
It turned out to be the worst, most miserable day of the year in recent memory.
I mean, how often do you see snow in Montgomery?
I've forgotten whose vehicle we planned to use that time, but it had broken down, so we all plopped into my old Dodge Daytona,
went down to the courthouse steps and had our announcement, and I promptly started the announcement with,
I'm pretty sure it was said that the last time a libertarian was on the ballot in Alabama,
someone said it would be a cold day in Hades before another libertarian would ever run again, and of course, here it is.
And I can still envision in my mind poor little Cynthia Bettis shaking.
I can't tell whether it was a green winter weather in this horrible cold weather,
but for some reason they had to deal with libertarians again.
Well, now it's a known quantity that we're in fact out there because the press has announced us.
Our first stop after that was to go to the Montgomery radio station for the Don Markwell show.
And all the caveats ahead of time, now John, you want to be careful, you know, Don Markwell, he's just, he's a quick wit and he's not going to suffer any nonsense.
Now he was supposed to be on the show for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, went on there, had a delightful time, ended up being on there for an hour or more.
Those are the victories. Every time you go out as a champion of liberty and somebody says,
well, gee, I'm just going to let this person in the door, let them talk for five minutes and just usher them out real quickly.
And then they discover that what you're saying actually makes sense. Wow, they are by far the biggest victories.
After that, we promptly went up to the Birmingham radio stations to find what was the biggest question up there.
They wanted to talk about Roy Moore and Myron Thompson.
Well, back to the religion.
Now, when asked, I would happily tell people that I'm a Greek Orthodox Christian.
As a matter of fact, one of my favorite chuckles was I was on a Christian radio station and after I got done,
And I prefaced my comment when they asked me about these issues.
There's absolutely nothing that Roy Moore or Judge Thompson
can do to increase or decrease the power of my God, one centilla.
And the thing they can do otherwise
is nothing short of foolish.
Afterwards, and clearly, a very religious radio station said,
are you a Christian?
And I said, yeah, I'm orthodox.
I didn't know Sophocles was Jewish, so I promptly had to remind folks that I'm Greek Orthodox
and yes, that happens to be Christian.
The only time that I would even begin to volunteer that is when someone is asked.
Now what was more interesting in sort of taking these victories where you could get them,
folks calling into the talk shows, etc., etc., they'd ask me about it and I'd say, well,
of course, two wrongs.
I didn't know back then to use my catchphrase, two wrongs make a right and a left, but it applies.
You have Myron Thompson over there, ruling wrongly, why?
There's already avenues in place to deal with this.
If you don't like Judge Moore's interior decorating skills, change the law, because the state law makes him steward of the rotunda.
Of course the other thing is if you don't like his interior decorating skills, the next election cycle, you vote him out.
Of course you have Myron Thompson on the other side and what this all comes down to, right, is that folks want to use the power of government to advance their ideas.
What can be a bigger indicator that you have no true faith or at least no true power in the faith of your argument than that you have to use the power of government to subsidize it or somehow cram it down someone else's throat?
Now when you read some of von Mises stuff, he clearly understands this. Religion, bad ideas, stupid beliefs will weed themselves out over time.
They do not need the help of government to be promoted or quickly advanced to be disposed of.
So, when you throw these little tidbits out, it was almost like folks would get angry at you.
You're throwing water on the fire. Remember, you've got all those pigs out there that want to wrestle and they like it.
When you throw water on them and you take away their mud puddle, they don't like it.
That, to me, is the most important thing of letting competition into politics.
Because Leviathan Party likes the sleight of hand, right?
They sit there and argue with each other and they're really trying to get you to believe there's a difference between the two.
But what's the objective?
The objective is more government, more command and control, and understand government works incredibly well.
All right, the next thing that I'd like to do with respect to just throwing out some ideas, as well as claiming it as victory, it was a wonderful situation to be in, and I'm about to talk about my campaign or second campaign manager, Dick Cronin, who is the executive director of the Federal Reserve,
Clark, to actually have to turn people down for speaking engagements. We had so
many places to go, so many places to be, that we couldn't actually be at all of
them at the same time. That is an envious position to be in, to go out and champion
liberty. Would it be a wonderful idea, and to watch the von Mises Institute
mature over the last decade or so, what's been done on the website is nothing
short of marvelous.
Why don't we make a live streaming audio of Liberty Radio, or the Voice of Liberty,
and I'll go ahead and tell you right now, I'll donate two or three days a week, and
I'll come in and talk and take in 1-800-number calls, get somebody to be a producer, and
if other radio stations want to pick up the link, let them pick it up and use it for free
for a year.
There's enough stuff here. What a wonderful thing to stand around these wonderful names.
Mises, Menger, Rothbard, Tozik, some of this stuff is already on tapes. Just play the tape.
Let folks know that you're out there from nine to five.
You will be surprised how many people will click on to hear that voice and will start thinking,
I can re-broadcast this cheaply. What a great deal.
Of course, there will be a lot of folks that won't like the competition as we affectionately call here.
Proved on the plains will not like something like that coming out to compete with it.
Well, probably the next big event to talk about after announcing the candidacy was the forum
that allowed all the candidates to come set up by the AU student government.
And this was going to actually be a pretty well attended forum by all the candidates.
Of course Scott Cajar, being the pit bull that he is at times, made sure he fought tooth
and nail that the Libertarian candidate got included and of course once we did that it
had the desired effect of all the other independent candidates were offered invitations, etc.
Some little memories along the way, the day before, actually not the day, hours before
I was about to leave to go over to the forum, a university administrator came by and knocked
on my door at the office and said, you make sure you don't embarrass us out there.
I thought to myself, and for those of you who know some of the university administrators,
I couldn't imagine anything I could do or say that would be an embarrassment, but it
It was a nice little chuckle along the way.
And of course I'm going to borrow from Paul Davis' nomenclature, puddle sharks.
There are many puddle sharks you'll see along the way and part of the victories are just
to give puddle sharks opportunities to do right.
Of course those of you who know the works of Mises, Rothbard and some other giants,
you can give them the opportunity but it's pretty easy to predict what a puddle shark
At the forum, I was the lucky one. I drew the number one. Then Congressman Reilly had the unfortunate position of drawing the number two.
At risk of using too many religious analogies, here was a man who looked as nervous as a prostitute in church.
Research. He did not like sitting next to me one whit. Now some of it was very, you know, well done, very well reasoned, and it got to the point where if one more time the Republicans down the end of the line answering after me said, I agree with Sophocles, I was going to throw up.
Of course, the only reason why they were agreeing with me is because I was there, and because the logic and reasoning was so sound, they didn't want to look like the fools that they would otherwise look like without somebody reminding them.
My favorite one of the evening, and who started off first changed over time, was once they went to the second round, they just decided not to ask me a question.
and Tim Lennox, who was the moderator of it from Alabama Public Television.
You can see him getting this weird look on his face like something's bad wrong.
He stops and he says, oh, excuse me.
We were supposed to go to Mr. Sophocles.
We left him out.
And I said, hey, Tim, don't worry about it.
I'm a libertarian.
We're used to being left out.
You have to have a little bit of fun and get a chuckle along the way.
The best one of the evening of substance was, I happen to be in the middle of the rotation.
And of course, they were talking about how you bring businesses into Alabama.
Of course, all the usual rhetoric, right, of giving them tax breaks and subsidies and all this other sort of nonsense.
And of course, it came to me and you have, I think it was 30 seconds to give your answers.
I said, well, the obvious answer to the question is how you attract businesses into Alabama is with low uniform, certain taxation.
Businesses love certainty. They will come looking for you if you are a bargain.
And I ended like, you know, with 20 seconds left on the clock. It was an eerie silence.
Then, of course, then it had to go to Bob Riley, who he just had no idea what to do, right?
Because he's been pounding how great it is that he's giving tax breaks to Walmart and Hyundai
and all this other sort of stuff.
It at least pricked their consciousness a little bit that there might be folks out there that know the emperor doesn't have any clothes
with respect to Leviathan parties.
The favorite chuckle line of the night and then they had call in folks at the end
and someone called in to get candidates positions on hate crimes.
And of course, when it came to me, leave it to the libertarian to use Occam's razor.
So I put forth the question, do you really care if you're killed by someone with joy
in their heart or hate in their heart?
You are still, you even heard folks say out in the audience, dead, and a couple of folks
actually chuckled.
Now of course, Bob Riley having to go after that one, you know, well yeah, I agree with
All right, John, when you start trying to come up with crimes that are really about what's going on in somebody's head and, you know, all this wishy-washy convoluted stuff.
The best story, and I wish he was here to tell it, was Scott Cajars at the end of this forum.
Of course, at the beginning, after, you know, getting into these petty fights with one of the Leviathan parties, was it the Republicans?
Sounds like probably the Republicans, anyway.
They wanted to have the table that was right next to the door, right?
And so, finally, you know, we just went ahead and put our table wherever it was,
and, you know, folks were kind of sniffing and looking, and, you know,
jeez, those libertarians, I guess, maybe.
At the end of the forum, they rushed out, all our literature was gone.
Gee, somebody's actually talking about something that makes sense.
I want to hear some more.
Liberty, gee, what a novel concept.
They're the victories.
All right.
The next one I want to talk about leads to the primary, to our next R.
We actually made a campaign issue out of the Williams case.
And for those of you who aren't familiar with the Williams case,
Mr. Williams was one of the folks that suffered in Marengo County
Where back in the 60s, the Alabama State Lands Division just took his property, paid him nothing for it, claiming that the Federal Government said it was Federal Swampland legislation.
And when they kicked the Williams family off and didn't pay him, they said they can live there until they die, but they can't farm or log on it.
Sound like Swampland to you?
Now, of course, when we promptly started reminding people of what the text is of the Fifth Amendment, right?
You can't take private property unless it's for public use and without just compensation, here was a killer.
Of course, once the Libertarian Party decided to make this a big issue, you started to see the Leviathan Party candidates get nervous.
The day before the primary, Governor Don Siegelman patents the land back to the Williams family in a great display, a great show.
So, of course I consider that a victory.
Now what's bothersome about that is that folks make it an issue because Mr. Williams was black.
Does it matter what color Mr. Williams was?
Of course not.
Now here's another caveat along the way in the victories.
Right, you have to be willing to go talk to the leper and the tax collector.
What does that mean? Yep, when you're invited to go talk to the Republicans and the Democrats, you go talk to the extreme parties.
But you've also got to be willing to go talk to the Association of Black Journalists, the Council of Conservative Citizens, the Southern League.
Whoever wants to invite you in their door to talk, you go and you talk to them.
And guess what? You start to find there's a lot of common ground.
Boy, when the NAACP, well, a student invited me to join the NAACP after they heard my lecture
about how the minimum wage discriminates against teens, minorities, blacks, whoa! They've
never heard that stuff before. Why? Because they haven't heard Champions of Liberty come
and give them that idea. You will be surprised how quickly the walls will come tumbling down
when you're willing to go anywhere and talk to anybody that's willing to listen. Is it hard?
Believe it or not, it isn't. When you go in well prepared and really understand the merits of
of Liberty, it's as easy to go talk to the CCC and the Alabama Association of Black Journalists
as it is to come and talk to the von Mises Institute.
Now why does that sound odd to the Leviathan party?
They have to keep track of their lives.
I'm championing liberty.
The same thing that I'm telling you today, I'm going to go tell whatever group I go that's
willing to have me and talk to them.
That's important.
Consistent. Well, rule of law. You want the hook or should I keep talking? 15 minutes and we'll see if you want the hook out again and open the floor for questions.
Back to the primary and quite nicely, Dick Clark is here who helped me write. We sent out press releases and all the sort of things that candidates
are supposed to do about how the primaries are simply an anti-competitive device and
a subsidy to the Leviathan parties. Why on earth should the taxpayers of Alabama pay
to determine who's going to head up the Democratic Party ticket or the Republican Party ticket?
Let them do it on their own purse. Wow, you'd have thought we sent shockwaves through the
and Media. Someone suggest that? Now the power of ideas, planting seeds are important. I
can't tell you how many times I alone and Dick has told me he's heard that parroted
back since we put that idea out there. Don't use the primaries to just go ahead and weed
out who ends up heading out the ticket on somebody else's purse. Do it on your own
purse. Now some more chuckle lines along the way and it's funny how people will read
After the primary, and of course it became known who were going to head up the Leviathan Party tickets,
a journalist came and asked me who I thought the better candidate was.
And of course I kept trying to avoid the question, right?
It's like asking me what smells better, chicken poop or turkey poop?
I just don't want to get into that conversation.
conversation.
So of course they keep pressing and pressing and you keep talking about the ideas that
you want to talk about.
He said, well, say one thing about the difference between the two.
And I said, well, I mean, Bob Riley's a little more accomplished prostitute.
He's got 30% more campaign contributions than the other guy.
So okay, one person has a little bit more to pay back once he gets into office than
the other.
Right?
and the preordained auction for future theft.
Somehow that got turned into an endorsement for Sigelman.
Don't ask me how.
Now back to Puddle Sharks and all this, you know, morass of Alabama politics.
After the primary and when it came time to re-up contracts, I was not rehired by Auburn
University nor was my campaign manager at that time, Scott Cajar, and of course very
predictable out of the puddle sharks.
And once again, you have to give the puddle sharks the opportunity to do right, even though
you know a priori they're not going to do right, that's part of our jobs as champions
of liberty.
To add insult to injury, since I had the audacity to run as a candidate, my taxes got audited.
What was the one big issue that they found?
I had made over $3,000 interest and at the end of the year had not paid up to 90% of
my taxes, so I had to pay a penalty.
So it was fun not just to watch the puddle sharks in action, but it ended up being a
campaign issue.
When did they set that $3,000 cap on interest?
1958.
You could buy a Cadillac for $3,000 in 1958.
Of course, that's one of those other issues, right, of how taxes just by inertia increase
over time.
I'm sure there were hundreds of people in Alabama that made over $3,000 worth of interest
One of the issues shortly after the primary, and I think it was purposely put after the primary because they wanted to wait until you got the Leviathan candidates in place, and it wouldn't be an issue, was constitutional reform.
You've got to love the libertarians.
I mean, the campaign contributions to my entire campaign were less than $20,000.
When you take the sweat equity and the time and the volunteering and the thought that was
put into it, hundreds of thousands of dollars, I mean some of it just money can't buy.
A previous brown bag invitee, Matthew Givens, went through and painstakingly was looking at this constitutional reform stuff and just giving me tidbit after tidbit after tidbit.
I'm loving life, right? I get to go out there and throw the fastballs and watch the morons swing at them.
The biggest one was, and I was on a talk radio show, I believe it was the Don Markwell show again,
And when they announced that they were going to allow, with the constitutional reform,
private contractors to just come and take property because they thought they could build
a strip mall or whatever.
And evidently this show had a lot of farmers listening to it at the time because when I
promptly said, okay, you farmers out there, you want to vote for this sort of thing?
Watch somebody come along and say, gee, well, we think we can make more taxes if we put
Jack Venable's office got bombarded with calls. He said, I quote, in the paper after that,
I have lost my stomach for Constitution reform. Too bad, it appears he's getting his stomach
back.
Other fun things to do with a constitutional reform debate, of course, when you have journalists
You know, stick their mic under your nose and looking for sound bites.
One of my favorites was Louisiana had constitution reform in 77.
They have over 200 amendments since then.
And you're complaining about our 1903 constitution with 800 amendments?
Sounds like about the same ratio to me.
Do you really think it's going to solve anything?
Well, they'd say things like, yeah, well, you libertarians, you just don't want any government.
Now, that's not actually true, right? We just want the government doing what it's actually
empowered to do, nothing more, nothing less. And of course, no discussion of the campaign
would be complete without education. Well, when folks started saying, gee, you keep talking
about wanting to cut education, give us an example. Of course, the easiest one was just
to go for the jugular first, right?
Get rid of extracurricular sports.
Let parents do it on their own dime, right?
Have Dixie use football, have Edrico baseball, basketball,
and let parents pay on their own dime.
But what about the poor kids
that won't be able to pay the fees?
I said, you're in Alabama.
Do you really think that that star player
isn't gonna have people groveling over him
to be the first one to pay his entrance fee into Dixie Youth football or whatever it is.
Of course, that's when people really started to get scared. Why? They wanted to paint this
as this libertarian nut candidate wants to do away with football. They did a poll on it
and the first poll had 38% of the people agreeing with me. They yanked that poll real quick.
Now, the plot sickens, right? You can actually march through the logic.
Do you really want a public school worrying whether or not the English teacher is a good football coach?
Whether the physics teacher can coach basketball? I just don't care.
Now, let that person who wants to be the football coach or the basketball coach compete to be the best coach in this private little world,
The next big issue, which was a delight to be invited to, and I was the only gubernatorial
Video Candidate were prison issues and they had a forum in Montgomery.
How we ended up getting invited to that forum was, and I can't remember whether it was you
or Scott, got me onto the Roberta Franklin show.
Now Roberta Franklin is hardcore.
She just doesn't suffer fools lightly.
And she'll happily volunteer to you that her son is in prison and thinks that what he did
was wrong because it was a property crime and that he should serve his time, but there's
no reason to abuse him while he's in prison.
There's no reason to shear him while he's in prison.
The data that she gives you is amazing, right?
For you to use the prison phone to call home to your family, dare we make those nice and
cheap so that you might be able to keep a family together.
were horrific, some as high as $10 a minute.
It was just amazing to watch the abuse.
Or Roberta plops down the numbers in front of you
and the documents, and it's just devastating.
Well, we go to the...
Well, let me talk more about the Roberta Franklin show.
It's the first show that I ever went to
when people called in and said,
you're the guys that really think the war on drugs is a joke, right?
You know, you sheepishly say, yeah, because you're waiting to just get hammered.
Well, it's about time somebody said that, it makes common sense, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then you get the caller that says, yeah, the war on drugs, it's a real problem.
You know, I mean, disproportionately you see, you know, blacks and Hispanics are being put in prison.
Well, you know, I kind of understand where you're going, but don't put me in the position of saying,
well, the war on drugs would be OK if our prison population from it exactly mirrored
of the U.S. Population, right?
It just doesn't matter, wrong is wrong,
whether you're doing it to somebody that's black,
whether you're doing it to somebody that's Hispanic,
whether you're doing it to somebody that's Greek.
And it was just wonderful to listen to the people call in
and the look of the producer of the show.
It was just, you know, that RCA Victor Dogg look
that you realize you've struck a nerve
and they never thought of it before.
That's the victory.
That's the power of the libertarian argument.
Championing liberty was just a wonderful thing
that I was asked to do.
All right, because I'm running out of time,
and I do want to open the floor
at least a little bit to questions,
and finishing out on our three Rs, I guess.
It really was interesting to watch the folks that got it.
Roy Moore vs. Myron Thompson
You basically have these different players that all they're trying to do is advocate their position using the power of government
and it doesn't matter whether you want to advance the atheist religion, whether you're trying to advance the Christian religion,
whether you're trying to advance Myron Thompson's religion where he wants everybody to pray to the federal government.
What's interesting is watching the money, and it was just amazing the first time you
talk to people and saying, gee, do you really think that the Southern Poverty Law Center
didn't think we're going to go judge shopping for this guy to transfer wealth to us?
Now once you start to watch the players, it's like watching pro-wrestling, right?
You got Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant over there mumbling, and people are throwing money
at the endeavor.
When you start learning to watch and follow the money, it's just like, you know, getting
out of that Socratic prison.
You start to actually see the sun and the world around you, and it starts to be fun,
right?
Don't just start picking sticks and throwing rocks in at the puddle sharks and just watch them react.
Don't get too immersed with them.
Now, of course, when the waters start rising and the sharks start schooling
and they start working in symphony together, that's when you're in trouble.
And I certainly saw that as well, which will bring me to my final little tidbit story of note.
Note, as the campaign was starting to come to a close towards election day, we were approached
by a Tuscaloosa businessman who wanted to run a campaign ad. Well, thanks to some of
these wonderful federal laws that they were trying to apply to a state election, which
I thought was bizarre to begin with, they wouldn't let this businessman run his ad.
So I get a call from this businessman. He says, you know, I've really got this ad I want to run about the gubernatorial race and the TV stations and the radio stations won't let me run it.
I'll give $10,000 to your campaign if you run it. I said, sorry, you can't do that. What do you mean you can't do that? I said, you can't give $10,000 to my campaign.
Well, why? Well, we put a $1,000 cap limit. That's the most that you can, you know, give to your campaign.
I said, if you want to be, you know, really constructive like my mom and dad did, my dad gave me $1,000 and my mom gave me $1,000 as, you know, separate individuals.
The silence on the phone was deadly. He couldn't believe a political candidate refusing money over principle.
I said, finally I said, look, if you want to give to my candidacy, great. If you don't, that's fine too. I said, this is a First Amendment issue and part of my campaign is to champion issues of folks and if you want to run the ad, feel free to run the ad.
I said this is a First Amendment issue and part of my campaign is to champion issues of folks and if you want to run the ad feel free to run the ad and so we had to put the little disclaimer on there about you know authorized by blah blah blah blah blah blah interesting to watch the media boy once we got it all set up and lock and loaded to go the media is right on the phone with Riley and the reason why I'm assuming they call in Riley
is an ad showing Riley pandering to some business people.
I mean, I didn't even like the ad. I don't care, right?
It's a First Amendment issue.
I'm getting phone calls up and down the line, you know,
from attorneys and radio stations and TV stations about, you know,
you authorize this, you know, we can't run this, blah, blah, blah.
I said, look, you do what you want to do.
The First Amendment, at last I checked, has not been repealed.
This is a solid campaign ad, go ahead and run it.
Well, when it turned out that I wasn't going to back down to them,
then the Riley camp calls.
And I'm on speakerphone with a group of thugs that was just unbelievable to hear.
The threats were amazing.
If that ad runs, we're going to make the next two years of your life miserable.
Of course, my response back, I think, took them off guard.
I said, now let's see, the congressman's inaction has made me homeless, you've taken
away my job, you've audited my taxes. What else can you guys do? Kill me? Have at it.
Once again, the silence on the speakerphone was deafening. I'm sure they had never been
accustomed to hearing that from somebody. Right? I'm supposed to just cower to the
and the Puddle Sharks, as everybody else does, that they're so used to.
Now, it really is important, I think in my mind, and I hope you agree as well,
that when you go out and you champion liberty,
you've got to be able to go everywhere and anywhere you can
and talk to anyone and everybody that's willing to hear the message.
It's a powerful message.
And the other thing that's really nice about it, when we feel that our almost 70 candidates, right,
one candle doesn't detract from the light of another.
We had almost 70 people out there at various stages in putting in various efforts out there championing liberty.
Just to see those names associated with somebody out there championing liberty is important.
Now, liberty, freedom, those words are getting bantered about so much these days that they've
become drinking games. We've got to improve the lexicon. Think about my jest. Two wrongs
make a right and a left. Right, left, conservative, liberal. None of those things mean anything
anymore. We're going to have to be succinct. Get people to understand there's a difference
between a command economy that we have here and an economy that champions and allows freedom,
that actually allocates resources to their highest valued use because there is freedom.
I'm going to finish with what amounts to be for some of you, I would think, a strange
Strange Dedication, and there are two individuals, but for a similar purpose.
I'd like to dedicate this to Ludwig von Mises and my paternal grandmother.
Strange mix.
It was maybe five years ago, was the first time that I had ever known that Ludwig von Mises was one of the folks
How is that similar to my grandmother? She actually witnessed the burning of Smyrna. I never knew that until years after she died. She never talked about stuff like that, and it appears to me that Ludwig von Mises didn't talk about it all that much either.
And I'm sort of torn. Did they purposely not talk about it because they wanted to make sure that folks weren't using that as something that they were going to hold up as a red badge of courage?
The peril is, if you don't talk about it, you recycle the stage for that same issue to come back alive and revisit you again.
I can't tell you how proud I am of my, I call them mine, our 68 or so candidates that went out and championed liberty, poked at the puddle sharks so other folks could see them and stay away from the puddles.
It's an important public service. If you don't, what will be revisited upon you is every bit as ugly as what we've witnessed with the National Socialists and all the other use of command and control economy devices to pick winners and losers.
If you think it's really that far in our past, you are sadly mistaken.
I got a chance to look at it straight in the eye for almost a year.
They're out there. They're very real.
Well, that's about all I have to say.
And it's always a delight to come and visit the von Mises Institute
and be somebody that has been invited to talk at the von Mises Institute.
We've got questions.
Besides Mr. Blackstock asking when I'm going to come and record my tariff lecture.
It sounds like your knowledge of economics was very helpful to you in the campaign in terms of dealing with going against much larger organizations.
Invaluable. And, you know, I was sincere in my beginning comment about, you know, having a sanctuary for liberty, like the Ludwig von Mises Institute is, is more valuable than any campaign contribution in dollar amounts that you could ever enumerate.
Enumerate, giving me the armor, the ideas, to go in a group of other people who know
how to think through things with logic and reason instead of trying to advance some agenda
is incredibly valuable.
The economic paradigm is something that I think I do a pretty good job at teaching.
This was basically my widest range teaching endeavor that I've ever undertaken, certainly
bigger than my 200 student sections over at Auburn University.
You could almost look through all the things you've said today.
A lot of the world's down to the victory is just being able to educate so many people about the issue.
Absolutely and you know he's a pretty under reported general in the
Revolutionary War but you know Nathaniel's green success was right we
fight we get beat we live to fight another day and sooner or later you're
going to wear down you know the Tories the Leviathan Party and people are going
to wake up and say gee you know this has merit the scary thing about all this is
is the numbers, how close they are, right? You basically had Sigelman with 29%, Reilly
with 29% and just how angry they were, the hate mail and emails that I received when
they thought that Sigelman had won, got a whole bunch of emails and said, well, I guess
you should be happy you got Sigelman re-elected. And then when Reilly pulled his neato turnaround
shenanigans game and he won, then I got hate mail from the Democrats saying, gee, I guess
Yes, you should be happy that, you know, you got Riley like that.
You know, it didn't matter to me one whit which of these two got elected.
What scares me is when folks get 29 percent of those eligible to vote
and they start talking about capital, mandates.
What the heck is that?
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, John.
Twenty-nine on twenty-nine.
Yeah, oh, I'm sorry.
Am I not clear? Okay. The 29% is those eligible to vote that actually could cast a vote in the gubernatorial election.
29% of them voted for the blue tick, 29% of them voted for the red tick, and 2% voted for, you know, other.
Now the sad thing of it is, and people were talking, you know, I was on one of the big radio stations, I think it was 104.3 in Montgomery,
where we on, it was one of those oldie stations. We had call after call coming in, wait, there's somebody else out there to vote for?
We didn't even know you existed, right? And of course what I didn't bother talking about,
I thought I'd hammered him too much before was the Myron Thompson endeavor. We basically wanted to be in the debates because we had major party status by law in Alabama to be on the debates and APTV decided, well, you know, we're just going to let the Democrats and Republicans in and, you know, come up with whatever ridiculous criteria they want and we said, look, if this was the Huntsville News or anything
and they want to box us out, fine. They're a private endeavor, they can do whatever they want.
Alabama Public Television, sorry, you take state and federal government money, you can't pick winners and losers.
And it just drove people absolutely batty that we were giving them that argument.
But you really do mean it'd be okay if you weren't invited if it was an NBC show instead of an APT show? Yes!
So what it ends up being, you know, your question is you've got this 40%, right, 29-29-2 other that either didn't like any of the candidates, so you could say sort of none of the above one, or they just weren't informed.
I'm convinced that if I was allowed on those two APT debates, we would have received much more than 2% of those eligible to vote.
Thank you for getting me to clear up what the 29, 29, and 2 were.
The comment made, I heard your message.
Do you think most people really understood that if they followed your line of law toward liberty,
that would mean no more hitties from the government for them to do?
My own mother, who hears me, re-urgentating the lecture about her being so evil.
Bless their heart, but she hasn't swatted you yet.
We'll agree, and then she'll say, oh, I'm so glad the prescription medication is really coming out, so I'll get my medicine cheaper.
Right.
Do people really understand that they're being cut off, too, as they call me?
Right, and the answer is yes, I do think they understand.
And the second part of the answer is it's a prisoner's dilemma.
Nobody wants to give up on their gravy because they just can't imagine liberty ever coming their way again.
I guess if I wanted to add a third dedication, one of my favorite lines is my maternal grandmother,
when she got her first Social Security check, she gave it to her oldest son and said,
here, I don't need this, I just heard on the radio the government's in debt.
Of course, they promptly convinced her, oh no, mother, you don't want to send that back to the government.
People who really haven't thought about, and it's a great sort of fear machine, have vested interest in you just keep going back to the Leviathan Party.
And I guess as they run back and forth between the poison well, right, you've got the red well over here and the blue well,
and people keep drinking from them, and they come and they talk to the libertarian candidate and they say,
And they say, gee, we're getting sick, and we go to the other one, and we're getting sicker.
Sooner or later, they're just going to, you know, die.
And it's not a pretty picture, right?
I mean, what we forecast in the end, pick whatever command and control,
whatever leviathan government, when it goes to its natural conclusion, it's not pretty,
because all you've been messing with is the law of gravity.
You keep putting off the inevitable.
I think that folks know exactly what's coming,
George, did you say your grandmother witnessed the burning of Smyrna that's in Izmir today?
I guess that's correct.
I didn't know about it until my grandmother's neighbor told me.
I just went up to Baltimore this summer, and she called it Smyrna, but you've got Greeks
I'm just recalling the chapter on the first democide of, what he called the democide of this century, which was the Turkish killing of the Armenians, in a few weeks, too.
In conclusion, there are a lot of dead people.