United States of America — Libertarian PartyCandidate for President

I was born and raised on a farm on the Rio Grande in Laredo, Texas. I graduated with a BA degree in economics from Virgnia Miiitary Institute and a law degree from the University of Texas. I was commissioned an infantry officer and served 8 years in the Reserves. I was a trial attorney in Texas for 12 years and also served one year as an adjunct professor of law and economics at the University of Dallas. In 1987, I left the practice of law to accept a position with The Foundation for Economic Education, the oldest libertarian educational foundation in the country. In 1989, I left FEE and founded The Future of Freedom Founation, which has published many books on various aspects of liberty. Among the honors I have received along the way: elected class valedictorian at VMI, awarded the Libertarian Party's Thomas Paine Award for outstanding communication of libertarian principles, and being selected as the keynote speaker at the 1996 LP national convention. My newest book, My Passion for Liberty, is autobiographical in nature and includes an introduction by former GOP libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul.

I am libertarian. For 30 years, I have been advancing the principled case for liberty, free markets, and a limited-government republic at The Future of Freedom Foundation (fff.org), the educational foundation I founded in 1989. I want to move America in a different and better direction--in the direction of liberty, peace, prosperity, normality, and harmony with the people of the world.

A genuinely free society is one in which people are free to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with their own money. Moreover, freedom and free markets are the only things that work. That's why I favor repealing all socialist mandatory-charity programs, including Social Security, Medicare, corporate bailouts, farm subsidies, foreign aid, and all other programs that take money from people to whom it belongs to give it to people to whom it does not belong.

A free society also entails the right to ingest anything you want, no matter how harmful it might be. Drug abuse belongs in the private sector in groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and narcotics rehab groups, not the criminal justice system.

The government's war on immigrants has brought nothing but death, suffering, and a police state to our society. The only way to end America's decades-old never ending immigration crisis is through freedom and free markets, i.e., open borders.

The Constitution brought into existence a limited-government republic. After World War II, the federal government was converted into a national-security state, which is a totalitarian governmental structure. A necessary prerequisite to a free society is the restoration of a limited-government republic along with a relatively small military force, which necessarily entails the dismantling of the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, the CIA, and the NSA, and the end of all foreign interventionism and its dark side practices (eg, assassination, torture, coups, invasions, occupations, sanctions, embargoes, alliances with dictatorial regimes, etc.), which has not only brought death and suffering overseas but also has destroyed our liberty and well-being here at home.