 I'd like to introduce you to the radical concept that libertarians should vote for an actual libertarian. We face an election where the only two people who have a realistic chance to win are pretty bad, but one of them is a much greater evil than the other, and that is Donald Trump. Effectively, we libertarians have to join one of the two broad coalitions, and the Republicans are the only one that's remotely reasonable. Who should libertarians vote for in the 2020 election? The presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden? Libertarian party candidate Joe Jorgensen? Or Donald Trump? That was the subject of a three-way online SoHo foreign debate held on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020. Arguing in favor of Biden was Ilya Somen, a law professor at George Mason University. Angela McCartle, the chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County, argued for Joe Jorgensen, and retired attorney and author Francis Menton, who blogs at Manhattan Contrarian, argued that libertarians should help to reelect Donald Trump. Here's Ilya Somen, Angela McCartle, and Francis Menton in an online debate moderated by SoHo Forum director Gene Epstein. This is a three-way debate. You can vote for Biden, Jorgensen, or Donald Trump, or of course you can vote undecided, which I guess in this case means none of the above. We have a lot to cover this evening, so I'm going to get right to it. I'll be keeping track of the time and we'll briefly interrupt each debater to say when he or she has five minutes left and one minute left. We're taking each presidential candidate in alphabetical order by last name, which means that George Mason law professor Ilya Somen goes first in making the case for Biden. Jane, please close the initial vote. Ilya, you have 12 and a half minutes to explain why libertarians should vote for Joe Biden. Take it away, Ilya. My case here is pretty simple. We face an election where the only two people who have a realistic chance to win are pretty bad, but one of them is a much greater evil than the other, and that is Donald Trump. So my framework for this is pretty simple. My view on how to vote in elections is that you should vote for the least bad candidate who has a realistic chance to win. It's called voting for the lesser evil, and I think there's a justification for that when there's a situation where no non-evil candidate actually has a realistic chance to win. Realistically, the chance that any one vote will make a decisive difference in an election is extremely small, probably only about one in 60 million on average in a presidential election, but if your vote does happen to make a decisive difference, then there is a potentially big payoff because that payoff is multiplied over many hundreds of millions of people in the US and to some extent around the world. And I'll start off briefly by talking about Joe Jorgensen. I don't really have that much quarrel with her. I disagree with her on some issues, but I think she's certainly better on most issues than either Biden or Trump. The only problem I have with her is that she has no chance of winning, probably no chance whatsoever. Indeed, it would be surprising if she got more than one to two percent of the vote. So if anybody can persuade me that she does have a substantial chance of winning, I would be happy to vote for her, but I think that's not going to happen. The rest of my presentation, I'm going to talk about Biden versus Trump because, sadly, those are the only two people who do have a realistic chance of winning. And there are several big issues where Biden has an enormous edge over Trump, and all of them are things where Trump has done horrible things through executive action alone, and ones where Biden is very likely to either completely reverse what Trump did or at least substantially pare it back. And the first and biggest of these is immigration. Since the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has made the US more close to immigration than at any time in our entire 200-year history. He has shut down virtually all immigration by people seeking permanent residency in the US. He has also shut down most temporary employment visas as well. And his advisors on immigration, like Stephen Miller, promise that they want to make these supposedly temporary changes actually essentially permanent. And there's no reason to doubt that that is indeed what they want to do should he win the election. Even before the pandemic, Trump imposed massive immigration restrictions, reducing legal immigration substantially, trying to close out almost every potential avenue for it. And in the process, he adopted brutal policies like child separation, which brutally victimized thousands of children. He has partially now restarted that policy, and we know that as he had said so, he would like to restart it more fully. In addition, Trump wants to get rid of DACA, which would mean that some 800,000 people who came to the US as children and have known no other home whatsoever, that they would be subject to deportation. The Supreme Court has for the moment stopped Trump's separatist, but they also made clear that he could find a way to do it if he just crosses his teeth and dots his eyes more effectively from an administrative law point of view. And it's pretty clear that if he wins the election, this is in fact what he is going to do. When you have immigration restrictions, particularly on this scale, it obviously has a massive impact on the freedom and happiness and well-being of the immigrants themselves. It literally traps many hundreds of thousands of people in brutally oppressive societies and does so through the use of government coercion. It also has a massive economic and other negative impact on the liberty of natives as well. It obviously keeps large numbers of Americans from interacting freely with immigrants through economic relationships and others. In addition, it imposes severe costs on the liberty of natives. For example, we're now seeing in Portland the sorts of brutal tactics first developed against immigrants, now being used against natives by the very same agencies that developed them, the CBP, ICE, and others. When this is done to immigrants, there's no way to ensure that it will be not be done to natives, and that is what has happened even before these most recent events, because of the very poor due process in the immigration system. Every year we have a situation where thousands of even American citizens, many of them native born, are detained that in some cases even deported by ICE, Department of Homeland Security, and other relevant agencies, and under Trump this problem has grown worse, because he has cut back on the due process afforded to immigrants from its already very low levels. It's worth also noting the massive economic impact of this. Many thousands of people are kept from productive jobs. This by itself is easily enough to outweigh any benefits created by Trump's deregulation in other areas. This is true if you just take standard estimates of the economic contributions of immigrants and compare it even to the administration's own somewhat inflated estimates of the benefits of its deregulatory measures elsewhere. I would note the Trump's recent shutdown of nearly all H-1 visas and visas for other highly educated immigrants is a major blow to American innovation. Immigrants massively disproportionately contribute to innovation to the startup of new businesses. It's exactly what we need to get out of our current economic doldrums, but thanks to Trump, if his policies continue, that will not happen. Instead the recovery will be longer and more painful, otherwise would be. What can be said for immigration can also be said for trade. Trump has started massive trade wars with the European Union, with Canada, with China, with Mexico, with a number of other countries around the world. When you total up the cumulative impact of this, it again easily outweighs any benefits from his deregulation. Even Trump's own former economic advisor Gary Cohn has estimated that the cost of his trade wars outweighs the potential benefits of the tax cuts enacted by the Republicans in 2017. This problem too is only likely to get worse, as the administration has become more protectionist over time, and Trump has replaced relatively more moderate advisors with more egregiously protectionist ones. If there's one historic libertarian cause out there, it is surely free trade. Biden is not perfect on this, but he would get rid of all or most of the trade war measures that Trump has instituted, and he has historically supported free trade agreements that would reduce trade barriers between the US and other nations. Another issue worth talking about here is the issue of government spending. Even before the current pandemic, Trump and the Republicans had managed to post record peacetime deficits that had massively exploded, and spending had increased massively under his watch as well. Trump has repeatedly stated from the 2016 campaign onwards that he doesn't care about limiting deficits in government spending, and that's how he has acted. His allies in Capitol Hill have also made similar statements. That is that Wenders is a Republican in the White House with a few principled exceptions. Most congressional Republicans simply don't care much about restricting spending. Now, it has to be admitted, Biden and the Democrats are also awful on spending, and in many cases would like to spend even more than is currently the case. However, we know that when there's a Democrat in the White House, Republicans in Congress get religion on spending and do in fact constrain it, as happened under Obama and under Bill Clinton. If Biden wins the election, it is likely that either there will still be a Republican Senate or that the Democrats will have only a very narrow majority, depending on the votes of more moderate Democrats and those more moderate Democrats together with the Republicans as unprincipled as they often are. They would constrain spending somewhat at least to a greater extent than is the case now. Let's talk next about in remaining five minutes, I would like to go on to the topic of property rights is I think Trump's horrible record in this area is underestimated. Trump and his attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions reinstated the federal asset forfeiture sharing program, which essentially enables the federal government to help state and local cops plunder private property, even from people who have never been accused of any crime and certainly never charged or convicted. And this is done on a massive scale. In some years, asset forfeitures take more private property from people than even conventional burglars do. That is the government steals more property thanks in large part to this federal program than even ordinary common criminals. And the Obama administration to its credit had partially shut down the federal program here, but Trump fully reinstated it. He's talked about how he's a big supporter of asset forfeitures and you can expect this plundering to continue probably on an even larger scale should he win reelection. Biden by contrast would reinstate at least those limitations that exist under Obama. Potentially he might even go further. You can tell a similar story about qualified immunity, which is the protection of law enforcement agencies from lawsuits when they violate our constitutional rights. Even in very egregious cases, they get protection. Trump supports qualified immunity. He and the Republicans in Congress have prevented the passage of bills that would get rid of it. Biden is not perfect on this, but he intend to support at least cutting this back significantly, whereas Trump does not. You can also with respect to property rights, it's worth mentioning the border wall, which is a major centerpiece of Trump's administration. If fully built the way that Trump wants it to be, it involves using eminent domain to take the property of many thousands of people. It would be the biggest federal government sponsored expropriation of private property in many decades, if not in the entire modern history of the United States. And it's clear that if Biden prevails, he would stop the construction of this thing. I think that's pretty obvious. You can also tell similar stories about civil liberties more generally. Look at the secret police tactics that Trump is now using in Portland and want to expand to other cities. Look at the fact that he has repeatedly urged regulatory agencies to crack down on his political opponents for speaking out against him. And there are many similar examples as well. Again, Biden is not perfect here, but he's considered we better than Trump and at the very least would stop these sorts of tactics that the Trump administration has engaged in. Are there a few issues where Trump is better? Yes, he's engaged in some economic deregulation on a domestic side, but this is easily outweighed by what he's done on immigration and trade. In some cases, he has appointed good judges, but this is offset by the fact that his judges tend to be very bad on issues of abusive executive power and on issues of immigration, which are precisely the areas where he would abuse his power most if he is reelected. Much more can be said, but for now and on this point, which is that if Trump is reelected, you can expect the Republican Party to continue to be a nationalist big government party of the kind it has become. On the other hand, if he is defeated, there is at least the chance that they will reconsider whether this is the direction they want to go in. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ilya. Next up, Angela McCartle, Chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles. Angela, you have 12 and a half minutes to explain why Libertarians should vote for Libertarian Party candidate Joe Jorgensen. Take it away, Angela. Hello, Libertarians. Liberty means to exercise human rights in any manner a person chooses, so long as they don't interfere with the exercise of the rights of others. And a Libertarian is someone who's committed to living their life according to Libertarian principles. So what is the purpose of a Libertarian vote? Is it about getting Libertarian messages to the masses? Is it about voting for the person who will do the least amount of harm? Voting maybe for the most Libertarian leaning candidate who has the best chance of getting elected? Surely the purpose isn't to throw support behind someone who sold out your freedoms for years or even decades because you're afraid of what the other guy might do. No, I'd like to introduce you to the radical concept that Libertarians should vote for an actual Libertarian. Libertarians should vote for Joe Jorgensen because a vote for Trump or Biden is not a vote for freedom. Neither will push us incrementally in the direction of freedom. Some of us are so caught up right now defending ourselves in the culture war that we've lost sight of the fact that we're being robbed of our liberties. Both Trump and Biden have supported endless war in the Middle East, overseeing the unprecedented expansion of national debt, militarized police state, and eroded our constitutional rights. A vote that supports four more years of state-sponsored terrorism and economic destruction is a wasted vote. That's a wasted vote. A vote that reflects the radical notion that your money and your property are your own and that U.S. militarism and inflationary policy should be rejected is a principled vote. Now let's look at some of the issues that a Libertarian president like Joe Jorgensen would work to correct. How about economics? Central economic planning is financial enslavement. Both Trump and Biden have contributed to your financial shackling and they will continue to do so into the future. Trump's trillions in debt and Biden's five decades of fiscally irresponsible public service have both pushed this country further down its path of economic ruin. Let's talk a little more about Trump's trillions. In January 2017, the national debt was around $19 trillion. Now it's almost $26 trillion, thanks to the $2.3 trillion CARES Act. It's the largest spending bill in history. Trump's trillions have ushered in an era of the very thing he swore to defeat, populist socialism. Our Republican president has praised and normalized populist socialism and the lack of Republican opposition to this bill was pathetic and voting for Trump will knock out any Republican politicians inclination to oppose spending bills like this in the future, just like Trump's populism has decimated the Republican Liberty Caucus. What happened to in the Fed? Trump delivered empty campaign promises just like every other Republican president before him. His first 100 days of office pledge included a plan to audit the Fed. But once Trump got comfortable in office, he said the Federal Reserve should get our interest rates down to zero or less. When the Fed slashed its rates to near zero in March, what did Trump say? It makes me very happy. I want to congratulate the Fed. I bet almost every single one of you has a button, t-shirt, or sticker that says in the Fed on it, because that's our libertarian battle cry. Libertarians cannot in good conscience vote for someone who praises the Fed's mission to print the dollar out of nothing in order to finance socialism and prop up the welfare warfare state. Joe Biden's tax print and spin policies will be just as bad as Trump's. His commitment to provide free college and healthcare will ruin future generations. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Trump's bad track record and obsession with dealmaking doesn't rule out the chance that he might do something similar. Because don't forget, he tried to pull it with healthcare at the beginning of his term. As debt soars, our middle class shrinks, and the working class becomes ever more resentful. Progressivism and greed are fueled by our president's failure to safeguard our monetary policy. Biden will continue this trajectory. Both Biden and Trump have normalized destruction of the U.S. dollar. Libertarians need to stand apart from this. We need to end the Fed. Joe Jorgensen has pledged to end the Fed and support free markets. She needs our vote, and we need to get her message out. Let's move next to Wars for Empire. For years, Trump tweeted we should withdraw from the Middle East. Three months into his presidency, he was launching Airstrikes on Syria, a country that was already so ravaged and war-torn, some of its major cities were still just piles of rubble. How about Afghanistan? On September 30th, 2019, Mohammad Saleem and his remaining relatives had the miserable opportunity to carry the bodies of their loved ones, dead men, women, and children out of their family home. They were killed in a drone strike operation the night before a wedding when airstrikes started falling on the house next door. Suicide bombers from that house set off their own explosives in response, and 40 people, including 12 children, were killed in the competing explosions. Donald Trump is our commander-in-chief. This was done under his watch, and every drone strike murder for the past three and a half years has been done under his watch. In January this year, Trump authorized the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani in Iraq. We are not at war with Iran. I know it was supposed to be different with Trump, but he's continued, if not worsened, the same foreign policy as the Obama-Biden administration. In 2001, Biden voted to support the war in Iraq, and don't forget he's been in the Senate or vice presidency throughout the entire span of the war on terror. How about Yemen? For five years, U.S. presidents have enabled Saudi governments to starve and bomb the people of Yemen. Thanks to Trump, there are 2.4 million malnourished and starving children in Yemen. How many Yemeni children have died due to Trump's sponsorship of Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, economic sanctions, all kinds of stuff? How much made in the USA shrapnel has been found next to bloody corpses of innocent families? Over 100,000 Yemenis, mostly civilians, have been killed in this crisis, and millions more have been displaced. Both Trump and Biden support a legacy of militarism that has normalized bombing weddings, murdering children, and committing assassinations and executions without trial. They are both directly responsible for continuing the war on terror. We need a president like Joe Jorgensen who will stop doing this. We need a libertarian president, and if we can't get one, we need to push back by refusing to vote for the people who send our troops off to murder civilians and create blowback. A vote for Joe Jorgensen is a vote against the warfare state. A vote for Joe Jorgensen is a vote for peace. Five minutes to go. Neither Trump nor Biden plans to roll back the surveillance states, of course, that go hand in hand with the never-ending war on terror. They will both renew the Patriot Act indefinitely and support policies that allow and enable the government to spy on citizens in their homes. Joe Jorgensen will not support state-sponsored spying on Americans because Joe Jorgensen respects you and she hasn't forgotten our Bill of Rights, or that we should not be subjected to unlawful search or seizure. Now let's talk about the drug war. In 2013, a young entrepreneur sat in front of his laptop in a San Francisco library working on his website. While he was working, he was interrupted by federal agents and arrested and subsequently held without bail. Two years later, he was sentenced to two life terms plus 40 years with no possibility of parole, and he sits in federal prison today reading letters from us as often as we remember to send them. If Joe Jorgensen was president, Ross Ulbricht would not be spending the rest of his life in federal prison. Joe Jorgensen would give him a presidential pardon. Trump hasn't done it. We know damn well Biden won't do it. The war on drugs has failed. Biden's 1994 crime bill has ruined more lives than statistics can keep track of. It's not just the thousands of people that Biden and Trump locked up for drug charges. It's their children and their families too. It's the rape kits that sit untested on forensic shelves, the murders that go unsolved, the cartel gangs that cross our borders and the inner city violence of the black market drug trade. War is hell, and so is the drug war. Joe Jorgensen pledges to decriminalize all drugs at the federal level, which is the way it should be. And what else waits for us in the wings at the executive level? Presidential powers unchecked. Biden is pledged to take executive action on a number of issues in his Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force, 110 pages that contains lists of tyrannical things to take executive action on, including a pledge to expand social security and fight gentrification. Dictators love unrestrained power and unconstitutional executive orders have become the norm for presidents. Executive authority should be used to undo unconstitutional actions of former presidents, like ending the warfare state. Elected officials, though, will do anything to hold on to their positions of power, including selling out their supporters by saying things like, take the guns first, do process later, and supporting a federal ban on bump stocks. Trump's comments and actions have emboldened and normalized gun grabbers and red flag laws across the country. Compromising on freedom never gets us more freedom in the long run. I want a president like Joe Jorgensen, who will unequivocally defend the Second Amendment. I want people to know I voted for someone who respects my rights to bear arms and my civil liberties. And speaking of civil liberties, how about coronavirus and civil liberties? Joe Biden has absolute contempt for our civil liberties. He's gone on the record saying he'll use executive power to force citizens to wear masks. Both Biden and Trump have politicized the coronavirus pandemic, but neither of them will do anything to protect our civil liberties because of it. The volatile mix of coronavirus politics, government shutdowns, and the culture war has created the perfect mix for protest, riots, hatred, and class warfare. Trump has ordered National Guard and federal agents to put down civil unrest with protests and riots. And while many of us are secretly pleased to see him own the libs, it sets a terrible precedent for our future, and it drives a wedge deeper between the left and the right. We need to reject the anger coming from both sides of the culture war because it is much more important for us to own our civil liberties. I don't want a president that says take the guns first, do process later. I want a president that says in the Fed. I want a president that says abolish the IRS, bring the troops home, defund the Department of Education. I want my vote to count because I only want to vote for libertarianism. I want a libertarian president like Joe Jorgensen, so please vote for Joe. I'll yield the rest of my time. Thank you. Thank you, Angela. Next up, Francis Menton, a retired lawyer and author of the blog Manhattan Contrarian. Francis, you have 12 and a half minutes to explain why libertarians should vote to re-elect President Trump. Take it away, Francis. Whom should a libertarian vote for for president in 2020? And I think the answer is obvious. It's Donald Trump. The main reason might might not quite be so obvious. It's that we have a two-party system. Each of the two parties represents a broad coalition of groups and interests, seeking to achieve sufficient votes in the right places to win a majority of the electoral college in the election. Because we have a two-party system, if you want to participate meaningfully in a presidential election, you must join one of the two broad coalitions that effectively compete for the presidency. If you refuse to join either of those two broad coalitions, you are just voluntarily excluding yourself from any effective participation in the process. And our two broad coalitions are called the Republicans and the Democrats. And thus I submit the only real choices are Biden and Trump. And between those two, with all due respect to Ilya, I think the choice of a libertarian for Trump over Biden is extremely compelling. I'm certainly not saying that Trump is perfect or even close to it, but effectively, we libertarians have to join one of the two broad coalitions and the Republicans are the only one that's remotely reasonable. I'll spend most of my time discussing the subject of why we have a two-party system and therefore why meaningful participation in the presidential election requires joining one of the two broad coalitions. When I say we have a two-party system, I suspect that many in the audience react with something like there's nothing inherent and fixed about that. As Ms. McCarty was just saying, we've got to vote for the person that we really like. Look at the UK, look at Germany, lots of other countries, Israel, Italy, Australia. They all have lots more than two parties. And those two parties win seats and they gradually build up their influence and over time become more important if they have a good message. Why shouldn't libertarians want that? Why shouldn't they go that way? And the answer is that our two-party system is a creation of the presidential election process and set forth in our Constitution. The other countries, the system is different. And our Constitution did not intentionally create the two-party system. But if you look at the history and the text of the Constitution, you quickly realize that it was inevitable. The relevant text is set forth in the 12th Amendment. It's only one sentence. So I'll read that to you. Here's the sentence. The person having the greatest number of electoral votes for president shall be the president if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed. And if no person shall have such a majority, then from the person's having the highest numbers, not exceeding three on the list, those voted for as president, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately by ballot the president. That's it. That's the whole thing. It doesn't say it explicitly, but what this effectively means is that if you want to elect someone to the presidency, you need to put together a coalition that effectively competes for a majority of the electoral votes on election day. Unlike in other countries, you can't get 40% on election day and then do a deal with somebody else who got 15 to put together your majority. If you're under the majority, you are out and you get nothing. The practical consequences of this dynamic was not at first obvious, but it became so over time. The real crunch first came in the election of 1824 when there were four main candidates, all calling themselves Democratic Republicans. And all four got electoral votes, but nobody got a majority. The election went to the House who awarded it to John Quincy Adams, as you know, but Andrew Jackson, who had more popular and electoral votes in the election, took that occasion to put together his coalition, which became the Democratic Party and became our first modern political party with a coalition of disparate elements. You might not think their allies included slave holders, yeoman farmers, frontiersmen, people who didn't like cities and the financial elite. It was very disparate elements who made themselves into a majority party to win the presidency. A couple of other elections after that in 1832 and 1836, the opposition to the Democrats couldn't get together. They had multiple candidates getting electoral votes and they lost and they lost again. And the Republicans only got it together when they formed as the anti-slavery party in the 1850s, but they took on lots of other disparate pieces of a coalition to put together majorities that could win the election, like Northern businessmen, entrepreneurs, industrialists, advocates of hard money and high tariffs and so forth. And that became the Republican Party. And since then, we have had two parties who have very disparate elements, who make allies to win a presidential election, which brings me to what for Libertarians has to be the most disastrous election in American history. That's the election of 1912. And you may know that Taft was the incumbent president, the prior president, Theodore Roosevelt, also a Republican, got into disputes with Taft, decided he want to run. At the convention, Taft got the nomination. Roosevelt said, forget about that, set up his own party. And so it was the two of them running against Wilson. Between Roosevelt and Taft, they got 52% of the vote. Wilson got 41% of the vote, but the Republicans split the vote and Wilson got 82% of the electoral vote and he got the victory. And we got what? We got the Federal Reserve. And we got the income tax. And we got World War I. And we got the segregation of the Federal Civil Service and so forth. Wilson's got to be the worst president ever. And it came about because the Republican coalition could not keep together to try to put together a majority of the electoral vote. And I just want to mention one other election where the third party, which was the most successful third party we've had since Ross Perot in 1992, and Ross Perot put on a real push to try to get the majority ended up with almost 20% of the popular vote and zero electoral votes. And the result of that is his movement went nowhere after him had faded away and died and you don't even hear about it at all since. So today we have two parties that again represent broad coalitions of disparate groups. The Democrat coalition includes the coastal elites, intellectuals, the media, academics, government workers, socialists, Marxists, ethnic groups, perceiving themselves as outsiders, people at the low end of the income distribution, and those on the receiving end of government spending programs. The most important central theme of the Democratic coalition is the desire to increase the size and power of the government. The libertarians should want to have absolutely nothing to do with that however the imperfect the Republicans may be. For the Republicans, the coalition includes equally disparate groups. Five minutes to go. Five minutes to go. You might think that there's tremendous tension in both the Democratic and Republican coalitions at all time. You might think that blacks and the teachers unions couldn't possibly be in the same coalition. They should be the most perfect natural enemies but they're not. Similarly for Republicans and for libertarians to join the Republican coalition, you are getting in bed with law and order people. You are getting in bed with people who are not perfect on free trade but they're better on free trade than the Democrats and they're as good or better on immigration as the Democrats, which I will get to in a while. As much as any of us might prefer Joe Jorgensen for president over Donald Trump, the fact is she's not in a position to make a serious play for a majority of the electoral vote. So I'll spend the rest of my time talking about differences between Trump and Biden. With all due respect to Ilya, I think he's come up with a list of issues and I would have to say as to his list of issues, I certainly am not a fan of Trump on maybe not all but almost all of those issues but I think Biden is as bad or worse and Biden is totally the creature of the crazy left wing of the Democratic Party that thinks all human problems can be solved by bigger government, more spending and suppressing all freedom and opposition forcibly. That's the opposition we're up against and we have to join one of these two coalitions. So Trump supports tax cuts. He's put a big one through. Biden actively supports tax increases, including raising ordinary income tax rates, raising capital gains rates up to the ordinary rates and new taxes of all sorts. Biden explicitly advocates government further takeover until they control absolutely all of it of the health care system. Trump has pushed a deregulatory agenda. Biden supports more and more regulations. Again, this should be a big issue for libertarians. The Green New Deal, Biden has a two trillion dollar plan to increase your price of energy and drive fossil fuels out of business. He's taken on Alexandria Ocasio Cortez as his main advisor on this. He plans massive new spending on pie in the sky energy schemes with no idea how they might work. He's promised to eliminate all use of fossil fuels. That's the fossil fuels that are providing about 80% of our energy and your air conditioning right now. In a July 14 speech, he would get rid of fossil fuels, the energy, the electric sector, the economy by 2025. He has no idea how he could possibly do that. But he plans to impose fast taxes and growth of government to try. He also is planning trillions of dollars in new spending to retrofit all buildings in the US. He's bound to ban fracking, which has cut the cost of our gasoline in half over the past couple of years and saved the American consumer hundreds of billions. He's backed by people who block every pipeline and every energy development of every sort. He's called for the jailing of fossil fuel executives. He's called for a nationwide ban on plastic bags and another speech he called for a ban on the use of all plastic. He's called for an end to shareholder capitalism. How could a libertarian possibly get on board with that? There's a huge issue of corruption with Biden, which I think I will save for my next piece of remarks. Two things I want to use in my last couple of minutes. One is Supreme Court justices. Only one minute? You have one minute and five seconds. One minute and five seconds. Okay. If you observe the Supreme Court, you know that the conservative justices have various judicial philosophies, but the liberal justices always vote as a block. And most important for a libertarian, the liberal justices always vote as a block on any issue that involves growth in the size and power of the regulatory and administrative state. They will support any growth in size and power of the regulatory and administrative state. And Biden would clearly appoint more of these people and cement the leftist control of the court for a generation and more. And the Citizens United case, that's the case where the Supreme Court said that corporations and groups can put together money to oppose the united voice of the media. The entire liberal block voted against it. Ruth Bader Ginsburg says it's her number one priority to reverse. That's the thing that protects your free speech. And finally there's the ongoing takeover of the Democratic Party by the far, far left. We've got 10 seconds for that. Who run Minneapolis in Seattle and San Francisco and yes, New York, they are Biden's people. They all support him. They want one massive federal bailout after another. They're trying for $3 trillion right now. I guess you'll have to finish that sentence when you do your own five minute rebuttal. Thank you, Francis Metton. I appreciate it. And we now go to rebuttal portion of the evening. We're going to take it in the same order. Ilya Somen, you have five minutes to rebut your two colleagues. Take it away, Ilya. So in my rebuttal, I'd just like to touch on a couple issues. Both of the other speakers touched on the question of taxes and spending, where Biden and Democrats generally do have some very bad proposals. But as I mentioned before, hair to separation of powers helps us. None of this stuff can be enacted unless it can get through Congress. And as I mentioned earlier, after the next election, either the Republicans will still control the Senate, in which case it can't be passed. On the other hand, it's possible the Democrats will have a narrow majority. But that narrow majority will be dependent on people like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema and others who have a very strong interest in not passing these huge spending and regulatory packages, if only because it's not in the interest of powerful interest groups in their state. For example, Manchin, who is from West Virginia, pretty obviously is not going to vote for the Green New Deal and the abolition of fossil fuels. On the other hand, all of the bad things that I mentioned earlier that Trump is doing and that Biden will almost certainly reverse, they were done through unilateral executive action that Biden could reverse with a stroke of a pen and will reverse not because he's necessarily such a great guy, he isn't, but because that's what most of his party wants. And what Biden does historically throughout his career is he generally does the things that his party wants, unless they would be hugely unpopular, hugely damaging to him, which in the case of these particular policies, it would not. I'd like to next talk about the war on drugs, because I think Angela was quite right to bring up the importance of this, and it's something I wanted to talk about in my initial presentation and have the time. I think it's absolutely right that Libertarian party is better on this than either of the others, but it's also true that the Democrats are vastly better than the Republicans. They're the ones who have almost all of them support legalizing marijuana nationwide and also severely cutting back on criminal punishment for other types of drugs, particularly with respect to the federal role in there. They also seek to roll back the militarization of the police, which has made the war on drugs much more deadly and harmful. They recently voted for a bill that would get rid of federally sponsored militarization of police. It's not certain that this can pass Congress, even if the Biden wins, but if the chance will be higher, moderate Democrats are unlikely to oppose that in the way that they would oppose some of Biden's other ideas. So at the very least, this is another big area where the Democrats are significantly better. Lastly, on this point about voting in the two-party system, I think it is the case that for structural reasons, where at least for the time being stuck with a two-party system, it will be very difficult or impossible to overturn. And therefore, in the vast majority of cases, any one vote or even a block of a thousand votes has almost no chance of making an impact. But a vote for a candidate that has a real chance to win, there is at least some chance to have an impact. On average, one in 60 million, somewhat higher in a swing state, lower in a non-swing state. Therefore, when it comes to voting, what libertarians should do is maximize the chance of reducing the amount of evil that might be caused as a result of the election in other areas where we can engage in other kinds of political activities that don't have the same structure of voting. There's a lot more that we can do to persuade people of libertarian ideas to spread them and therefore to ensure that in the future, the parties have an incentive to nominate less awful candidates that is currently the case. Sadly, however, the libertarian party has not been very affected. It's been around for almost 50 years now. And all that time, at least at the federal level, it's hard to point to even one policy success that they have had an important role in. Whereas, by working within the major party system and also by doing things outside the party system, your libertarians have made a bigger difference. I think, therefore, the activity of voting, it should be separated out from our other political activities because voting has this narrowly constricted structure where it's highly likely that it won't make a difference no matter what we do, but in the small chance that it does make a difference. It can only be if we vote for somebody who has a real chance to win, whereas other things we do, organizing, speaking, contributing money to various groups and so on, there the structure is different and it's perfectly consistent to vote for the lesser evil on election day, but promote good at other times so that next time around the next election, the available evils will be less evil than is currently the case. Thank you, Ilya. Just six seconds under your limit. You did well. Angela McCartle, you have five minutes to rebut your two colleagues. Take it away, Angela. Okay, let's start by working our way backwards. The Libertarian Party has definitely helped to push the Overton window on federal issues and one of those would be gay marriage. We were the first party to come out in support of it and eventually the other parties did have to adopt it, so that's really great. Ilya said before when you vote, the chance at your vote will make a difference to the outcome of an election like a presidential election is extremely small, one in 60 million. Another thing that Ilya anticipated would talk about, but he didn't bring up was public choice theory, which talks about how voters don't make much effort to learn about the issues and survey data overwhelmingly shows that they don't know even very basic things about how the political system works. If that's the case, we have to catch people's attention in order to actually get them educated and you don't combat rational ignorance with rational arguments about boring two-party candidates, you combat rational ignorance with radical ideas. No one cares about regular politics and that is a whole part of the problem. So Biden supported record deportations under the Obama administration and he voted for the 2001 Iraq war. There's no reason to trust him on immigration, which is something that will probably be decided by the legislature at this point in the fight. His 1994 crime bill, he's still bragging about it. He was bragging about it in 2015 at a fundraiser. Are we supposed to think he's had a complete philosophical about face on the war on drugs that he authored? And he does not support legalization of cannabis and he does not support ending qualified immunity. He refused to say anything more specific other than he supports reigning it in, which is a meaningless statement. His Buy America plan furthers Trump's protectionist plan and commits more taxpayer money to a plan that will drive us deeper into debt. Trump, let's talk about his terrible appointments. He's appointed Bolton, who's an advocate for regime change and military action all over the world. Jeff Sessions, who reversed Holder's reduction of mandatory minimums and escalated the federal war on drugs. How about Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director? Don't think that voting for Donald Trump will push you in the path of liberty. It won't. Another point I'd like to make is that Donald Trump is anti-establishment. But anti-establishment is not always libertarian. The Communist Party is anti-establishment. So is identity Europa in Europe. Not everything anti-establishment is good. How about Trump's task force on crime reduction and public safety? He's increased the funding for the drug war and the enforcing federal law with respect to transnational criminal organizations and preventing international trafficking. What a mouthful. He's also increased international efforts and spending on the war on drugs and cybercrimes. Trump's trade wars with China have damaged American industries like the steel industry and caused costs to go up. His tariffs have been terrible for everyone. And social mobility is decreased due to Trump's fiscal policies. There are no promotions on unemployment. None. A vote for Trump means a decrease in the Republican Liberty Caucus presence as well. Ron Paul's 2008 run had a groundswell of Liberty Rs running for office, but not much has happened with them since Trump ran. He's basically rendered the RLC and the Freedom Caucus ineffective. And there's no more offensive resistance to big spending bills. More fiscal issues. Cutting taxes. Cutting taxes without cutting spending does not result in a real reduction of our public spending burden. It just changes which pocket gets picked. Trump's tax cuts are made up for with inflation and increases in debt. Instead of being paid for by direct taxes, the additional spending is just paid for by printing currency, which devalues people's savings, and by adding debt, which increases our debt payments and further limits our ability to raise federal interest rates on our debt. Trump has increased the federal deficit, as I mentioned previously. As Ilya stated before, your vote only has a 1 in 60 million chance of counting. So why not vote for the Libertarian? Put people on both major parties, think that Libertarians just want to take over the two parties. We can make them better. But the other two parties don't even want us. Voting for a Libertarian is a principled way to vote. The swing state argument and similar arguments are no different than a version of don't waste your vote. You're not beholden to vote against someone evil by voting for someone else who is evil. It does not change the outcome. The two parties are the same. They are both pushing us in a path of socialism and economic destruction. Thank you, Angela. Francis Menden, you have five minutes to report your colleagues. Take it away. Thank you very much. So I come back to the real alternative for Libertarians is to join one of the two big coalitions. And then what? And then work within that coalition to make it move in a Libertarian direction. And that, in fact, has been happening substantially. The Republican Party was basically establishment, go along, get along. When I was younger, today it has a big freedom movement in it. You may say that it has, that freedom movement has diminished in the last few years, but over the past 20 and 10 years, it's greatly grown. And it's our responsibility to grow it some more, rather than going off on our own little movement, which will have no influence on anything. On the one in 60 million that Ilya has, that's like the total number of votes. I want to point out, as most people here know, the 2000 election was won by 500 and some votes in Florida. Do you think that's the only such election? Believe it or not, because I studied elections for purposes of preparing for this. The 1884 election was won by approximately 1000 votes in the state of New York, by Grover Cleveland. If New York had gone the other way, the election would have gone the other way. And similarly, the 1960 election was won by some very small number of votes in Illinois by Richard Nixon. Here is a question that I think we really should address. What if I live in a non-competitive state like New York or California? Why don't I vote for the Libertarian candidate? Because Trump's not going to win that state anyway, and we'll show that the Libertarians have some support out there. And I will admit that I followed that theory and voted for Gary Johnson in the last election. But here's the risk. Last time Trump lost the popular vote. If he doesn't waste his time campaigning in states, he's going to lose anyway. He risks losing the popular vote again, which will increase the outrage and the claims of illegitimacy against him, even if he wins the election again, in a way similar to what he did last time. So I think it's important for Republicans to come together as close as possible in the blue states in order to prevent this from happening. The more Trump votes Trumps get, the harder it will be to accuse him of being illegitimate, and it will help his ability to advance elements of his agenda favored by Libertarians, like deregulation, Supreme Court justices, tax cuts, and the like. Now I want to address at least a couple of the points raised by Ilya. Let me try immigration, because I'm a fan of more rather than less immigration in general. But immigration is a complicated subject. There are about 8 billion people in the world, and probably half of them would like to come to the United States if they get the chance. Unfortunately, that's not practical, and it could swamp our constitutional system very easily. Existing law permits about a million people a year to come. That's a pretty good number, I think. I mean, you might argue for more, and you might argue for less, but a million people a year is a pretty good number. Now Trump, up until just recently with the virus, hasn't really cut down on that. Recently he has, but I think it's going to go back to the million, because that's basically what Congress has said. Maybe we should think it should be a million and a half, but it can't be 50 million, or our country would just be immediately swamped. And once that whatever the number is, even if it's a million and a half or two million, it still has to be enforced. And you could call the people stormtroopers, or children in cages, or whatever. Every time somebody gets arrested in this country, they get separated from their family. I'm sorry. If they're here illegally, they're going to be arrested and removed. And there really is no alternative than that. Okay, I want to address the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force. Angela mentioned it. This thing is 110 pages of every progressive wishlist, every spending program, the takeover of the energy economy, the takeover of education by the federal government, the takeover of the medical sector of the economy, the takeover of the housing sector of the economy. Every big government idea on every subject from the Green New Deal, you name it. Stephanie Kelton is one of the members. She's the modern monetary theory woman who says, just print money and spend infinitely. That's the theory that the Democrats now have, and that Biden explicitly says he backs. And one final thing, Biden corruption, which I said I would get back to in my opening. If you look at Biden, is one corruption after another, and Ukraine is something else. I'm sorry. You have to get to that in your Q&A, in the Q&A section. So I just have to enforce the time. I mean, this is a thankless job here, but I kind of whip you people into shape. Guys, thank you very much for your initial statement and for your rebuttals. We now move to the Q&A portion of the evening. And the first thing for me to do is to go around and in the same order, and first ask Ilya, do you want to put a question to Angela, to Francis Menten, or to both? Or do you want to wave the honor for the time being? You can take the prerogative, ask a question later. Do you want to take that prerogative now? Ilya Somen. I guess I'll ask a question to Francis now, which is that in your presentation, you talked about the history of the two-party system, but it seems to me that the separation of powers here is also important. And I wonder, do you have an answer for the fact that all of the harmful things that Trump has done that I've listed are, in fact, ones that he's done through unilateral exercise of executive power and therefore can be expected to continue, whereas nearly all of the bad things that Biden might do that you and others have mentioned, they do depend on getting through the legislature and does are much less likely to happen. Francis Menten, please answer the question if you can. Okay, I can't think of how you could say that. The guy who invented the pen and the phone was Obama, as far as I know, and he had a series of pretty incredible executive orders. And you could call it bad, but one of my favorites is DACA, because DACA, Obama completely admitted that it was not permitted by the law and that he couldn't do it. He said multiple times that he would love to do it, but he couldn't do it. And then he just went ahead and did it in defiance of the law. Another example that's totally from the regulatory state, the Green Power Plan, which completely would shut down all coal power plants to begin with and all other power plants, fossil fuel. After that, that was totally done by regulation and with no legislation behind it. And Biden totally announces that he intends to transform the entire energy economy based on what he claims is a view of environmental law and already in place. And he's just going to do it and cost the American people trillions of dollars by doing that. So I just don't agree with you. I'm not saying Trump is great, but Biden is as bad and worse, worse, worse. I guess, by May, I just, moderate it to intervene, you were referring mainly to Biden's tax plan, which some of us believe is kind of a war on capital. And that would have to be approved by the House and Senate. So I guess, is that what you were mainly referring to? No, not just that. I was also referring to most of his regulatory initiatives, various spending programs and so forth. All of that would have to be passed by Congress. And for reasons that I mentioned earlier, it's not likely to be passed, even if the Democrats get a narrow majority in the Senate, because people like Seneva and Manchin and others are unlikely to vote for it. Buddy, Francis Metton, do you have a response to that? Or do you want to waive, Your Honor? Well, I have to say one sentence, which is, I think, the whole Green New Deal thing, large, large pieces of it they're planning to do by regulation, which means by executive action, not asking for new laws from Congress. Angela McCartle, do you want to comment on the exchange between Ilya and Francis? Take it away, Angela, if you'd like to comment on what they just said to each other. Well, I agree. I agree that a lot of the 110-page unity task force proposals are going to be achieved through executive order, because that's what it says. It says it right there. However, Donald Trump's spending, which we have all witnessed in the past three and a half years, is not much better. And it looks like he has basically just adopted progressive spending and slapped a MAGA hat on it and an elephant and called it owning the libs or voting to protect our freedoms, which are all honestly just that fight is happening at the level of governors. So I don't see a major difference between the economic policies between the two of them. They're just wearing different scary masks. It's the same disgusting body. Angela, do you want to take the barracuda to ask a question of either Ilya or Francis, or both at this point, do you want to wave the honor until later? Sure. I'll ask Francis, where do you see the Republican Party in about 10 years? Well, Angela, I am an optimist. And as I have advocated in my presentations here, I think we libertarians should become active in the Republican Party. We should work with the Republican Party, and we should work to move it in our direction and to make it a party of smaller government. It pays lip service to that, but in order to actually accomplish it, it needs libertarians, libertarian-oriented Republicans in the Congress. It needs a libertarian-oriented president. And for the reasons I've stated, that's only going to come via libertarians working through the Republican Party to accomplish it. I'd like to see that happen. Do you want to comment, Angela, on Francis Benton's response? Sure. How about what we've seen with the RLC and the Freedom Caucus basically being destroyed under Trump's populist agenda? It doesn't look like joining the Republican Party is actually working out right now. It doesn't seem to have much liberty messaging. Well, I think it does have liberty messaging. And again, I said in my presentation that the Freedom Caucus of the Republicans may have diminished some over the past few years, but it's increased a lot over the past 20 and 10 years. And I would hope to regain that momentum. Ilya, do you want to comment on the exchange between Francis? But Francis said earlier that the liberty movement is growing in the Republican Party. It's seen immediate he must be observing a very different Republican Party than the one I've seen over the last several years. In reality, what has happened in the Republican Party is an embrace of big spending, an embrace of severe restrictions on civil liberties, trade wars, immigration, family separation, and so forth. All the things I mentioned earlier, even an embrace of things like asset forfeitures beyond what occurred before, building big border walls by confiscating thousands of people's property and so on. And if you look at the intellectual trends within the party, it's not even just Trump, sort of the hot younger people in the Republican Party, hot politically, not necessarily physically, are people like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, both of whom make support big government nationalism. So if we want a Republican Party that moves in a different direction, it has to be a Republican Party that gets beaten for moving into the Trumpist direction. That will give it some incentive to look at other things. Those possibilities might still not be great from a vegetarian point of view, but they're likely to be at least somewhat better than what exists now. So if you look at what Republicans are saying, people like Hawley, people like Trump, people like Cotton and others in the party, they openly talk about how they reject limited government, they reject free markets, they prefer protectionism and nationalism. And it's unlikely that we can move them off of that unless they get a political incentive to behave differently. Okay. Francis Metton, your turn. Would you like to put a question to Angela, to Ilya, or to both? Take it or we'd like to wave the honor to you later. Take it away, Francis. Maybe if I work in that comment, you couldn't get in, Francis. Go ahead. I'll just ask Ilya to comment on the Biden-Sanders unity program for a federal takeover of everything. How could you support Biden with that? I have two answers. One is it's not a takeover of everything, though it would be a takeover of too many things. But my other comment on that is what I said before, that most of it would have to pass through Congress, even the parts that they say they can do through regulatory action. A lot of it would be undermined in the judiciary. There's a lot of Republican judges out there who would not be happy to approve those programs. Finally, in that unity program, there actually is some stuff that is actually good, like reducing militarization of the police, cutting back on things like asset forfeitors and qualified immunity, and also some pretty good measures on immigration. All of those things actually Biden could do through executive action, at least given that most of those there are things where Trump has so far gotten away with unilateral executive action. It was interesting to me earlier when you were asked, when you tried to name things that the Democrats did through executive action. One of your only two examples was DACA, which is actually a really good thing, protecting 800,000 innocent children from deportation. I don't agree, by the way, that Obama said it was illegal. You can argue about whether it was illegal or not, but to the extent that it's survived, it's actually a good thing for a libertarian point of view, a very obviously good thing actually. Angela, would you like to comment on the exchange that just took place between your two colleagues? I don't think so, thank you. Okay, so you will not condescend to even comment on what you guys just said to each other. And so now I want to use a moderator's prerogative to ask you each question. I'll take it in the usual alphabetical order. Ilya, you're probably aware of, because the things that your two colleagues have alluded to, and let me meaning that the Democratic Party is now making greater peace with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. And that if I may add to the ghoulish statements that are being made about Biden, we're going to have a brain dead president who's going to report to Nancy Pelosi, or maybe attack her from another standpoint. Could there be a vice presidential candidate that Biden appoints? We don't know that yet, so maybe a little bit premature in this debate. Could there be a vice presidential candidate that he appoints that would so horrify you that you would vote libertarian or vote for Trump? All of those fears about how a Biden presidency is going to be passive, and indeed that whoever he appoints as vice president could take over will probably that he'll be a one-term president, and we could have some kind of Sanders era ahead of us. What is your response about fear? My response is to fold. One is most of the people he's considering, they don't look that much different from Biden himself in terms of policy preferences, with the possible exception of Elizabeth Warren, who at this point at least it seems unlikely that she will be chosen. Moreover, to the extent that you think Biden will be relatively passive, that reduces the chance of harmful executive action on his part. On the other hand, even if he's generally passive, he will at least reverse all the things I mentioned earlier that Trump did, even if he himself may not be super motivated to do so. His party really hates those things, and from the standpoint of his party, reversing all those things is relatively low-hanging fruit, because it can be done through executive action, whereas most of the really bad stuff that the party wants to do, most of it on taxing, spending, and certain kinds of regulation, that does have to get through Congress, and it will be very difficult for it to do so, even if the Democrats do get a narrow majority in the Senate. It is true there is a very harmful wing in the Democratic Party, the Bernie Sanders wing. That's a bad thing. I'm not happy about that. But in the Democratic Party, or I'm sorry, in the Republican Party, the harmful, dangerous wing, the big government nationalists have already taken over the party. They're already in the White House, already in power, Stephen Miller, Trump himself, Holley, and others, sad between a party which has a bad wing, but that has not taken over at least so far, and a party where the bad guys, the worst guys really, because they're all bad guys, and either the worst guys, they have actually taken over. I prefer the one that hasn't been completely taken over by its worst elements to the one that has. Angela, would you like to comment, Neilia's answer to that question? I don't believe that the Democratic Party is going to fight hard against the progressive element. I believe that the progressive element is dragging the rest of the party along the ride. That's the way that it's going, and so when we talk about, oh, it's just an unsavory element, and I don't like it, it is the future of the Democratic Party, and I think that that's something people need to consider. Do you want to vote for that and help that to gain traction in the next not just four years, but 20 years, 50 years? The time that you're alive in the United States, is that what you want to support? Francis, would you like to comment on Neilia's answer to that question? I thought Angela gave an excellent answer. The progressive wing, the Socialists, and the Marxists are rapidly taking over the Democratic Party and controlling its agenda, even though they might be a small part of its voting base, and I don't see that changing. I see it only getting worse. I think the audience appreciates as to why. Let me say one more thing, which is libertarians have no place in the Democratic Party. The chance that libertarians could go into the Democratic Party and move any of it in our direction is zero. That's it. I think the audience appreciates as to why the ways in which alliances swing in this three-way debate. Francis, it's now your turn. I'm sorry, it's Angela's turn to sit, Nazi, with my moderator's question. It's a similar question, really, to the one I put to Ilya, that Joe Jorgensen is a full libertarian. Angela, as you know, she made a statement about how libertarians must be very active with the anti-racist movement, that they must imply that we should all be in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. That was a statement that many thought was not the statement that a libertarian should make, and that, therefore, she's truly not a representative of libertarianism. How would you respond to that? Absolutely. It's a very legitimate concern. She did not make the tweet herself. Someone on her staff did, and it was course corrected a little bit right after. Joe is trying very hard to reach out to people who are not libertarians, but I got to tell you that Joe is an excellent candidate. She is 10 times more principled and articulate and economically literate than Gary Johnson, and she knows where a lepo is, and she's definitely not a Marxist. We hold Joe to a much higher standard than we hold the other two major parties because she's our candidate, and we care about her messaging. Something that I found to be really nice is that Joe and her campaign manager are actually responsive to feedback, and I guarantee you that Donald Trump and Joe Biden are not responsive to your feedback. Ilya, would you like to comment on the answer to that question, or you want to weigh the honor? Ilya? Sure, why not? I think anti-racism is one of these terms that has many different meanings. In the most extreme left-wing meaning of it, obviously, it's something that libertarians would not support, but in the ordinary language meaning of it, it just means being opposed to racism, and in particular, being opposed to a government which discriminates on the basis of race. That's in sharp contrast, by the way, to many of the policies that Donald Trump and the GOP have favored, including large-scale use of racial profiling and immigration enforcement, where even under Obama, but now even more so under Trump, official policy is that you can use racial profiling, which means racial discrimination and immigration enforcement, so long as it's within 100 miles of a so-called border area, which turns out to be areas where two-thirds of Americans live. So I think you can argue about the term anti-racist, but I think in the way that Joe Jorgensen probably meant it, I think she was right, and that libertarians should be anti-racist in the sense that we should oppose claims that one race is inferior to another, and that the government should be able to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity and similar characteristics. And when it comes to things like immigration enforcement, one enforcement generally, while the Democratic Party is very far from ideal, they are better than a Republican Party in this area. I do recognize that Democratic Party does have flaws in this area on the affirmative action front, but as between discrimination when it comes to things like college admissions and discrimination when it comes to matters of life and death, when immigration law enforcement, the party which does it when it comes to matters of life and death is worse. Francis, would you like to comment on Ilya's comment or Angela's comment or on the question regarding Joe Jorgensen? Yeah, that was specific to Angela and our wave comment. Okay. All right. Your turn to be in the hot seat with the moderator, buddy Francis. And the question is a similar one to the one I put Ilya and Angela, which is that Trump is a kind of a full libertarian, a full Republican, I should say, and indeed also a full libertarian. You mentioned the free trade. The free trade was a plank in the Republican Party, but you seem to concede that Trump is clearly not a free trader, for example. And then the point that Ilya made was that a repudiation of Trump's presidency, if it goes down to defeat, could result in the possibility that the Republican Party could repudiate Trumpism and go back to its roots. And so can you comment on that broadside attack against Trump? Well, starting with if Biden wins or if Trump wins, there's going to be a different Republican candidate in 2024 and the Republican Party can move away from Trumpism equally at that time, whichever one of the candidates wins. On the question of free trade, yes, I am basically a free trader and Trump is not. I guess that's a question of how heavily you want to weigh that. I don't think that Trump has greatly undone free trade. He made a big deal about Canada and Mexico. After a while, we have a new deal. I would say I'd prefer the previous one. I don't know all the details, but I think it's a number of tweaks, but it's pretty similar. In the case of China, yes, he's made some huge changes to previous free trade, but I would say China is a bona fide security threat and there are big security issues and he's absolutely right to be dealing with that. And even though I'm a free trader, I think the security issues with regard to China have to be dealt with by whoever is present. Now, the final thing basically between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, the Republican Party has much more of the free trade party and the Democratic Party is much less the free trade party with their, particularly with their labor and environmental allies. So as bad as Trump is, I think we are better off with Trump and the Republicans than Biden and the Democrats on free trade issues. Elliot, do you want to comment on another question and on Francis's response? Yeah, just very briefly. First, it seems very unlikely that the Republicans in 2024 will suddenly repudiate Trumpism. If in fact it seems politically successful, which it would seem that way if you were to win reelection despite the horrible current economic crisis and the coronavirus pandemic and so on. Secondly, on the issue of free trade, I think it's pretty obvious that the Republican Party has become much more protectionist than the Democrats. That's a change compared to 10 or 20 years ago, but it's a real change. I just give the example that Trump withdrew the U.S. from TTP, a major free trade agreement that would have encompassed numerous countries in the Pacific and by the way would have helped to counter China. That agreement was signed by the Democrats. They would have passed it. Trump withdrew us from it. In addition, he has started trade wars with almost all of our allies with the European Union, with Japan to some extent, with Canada, with Mexico. Even by the way, after the new version of NAFTA, he still has kept in place various tariffs on Canada and Mexico that he put in supposedly as leverage for those negotiations. So I think there can be no serious doubt that the Republicans are far more protectionist than Democrats right now, even though the Democrats certainly have plenty of flaws of their own. And if Trump were to win the election, that would confirm the Republican Party as the strongly protectionist party that it has become. Angela, do you want to comment on the question and on your colleagues' answers to that question? No. I guess just a short comment that neither party is good on trade and I think that actually the other two professionals have explained that pretty well. I think we all have a pretty good idea of where everyone stands. Joe Jorgensen is very pre-trade, open to trade. The other two are not. Thank you. We have a question that came in from the audience. Here's one for Ilya, the questioner writes. Trump has not started any new wars, and it is safe to say Jorgensen would not either. How can we trust Biden to show the same restraint? Shouldn't that be a deal breaker for libertarians? Can you answer that question Ilya? I think we are at more risk of new wars with Trump than with any of the other alternatives because Trump has engaged in repeated, dangerous, saber-rattling with Iran and North Korea and even in some other contexts. And also Trump is deeply ignorant about the state of the world. So he could easily end up in a war dressed through his own stupidity or miscalculation. And at the same time, Trump through his trade wars and other policies has deeply alienated most of our allies. And therefore, if we were to get into a conflict, we would be more likely to not have any support from the allies. I think Biden's judgment isn't perfect on this, but he did show considerable restraint when he was in the Obama administration. And it seems unlikely that he would start a war just through stupidity or miscalculation. And if he were to enter one, we would at least be with significant allied support. And therefore, to burden would be more reasonably shared. Whereas under Trump, any war that he would get into would be one where he would be isolated. Do you want to come in on that, Francis? I'll waive the honor. I'll waive the honor. Angela, do you want to waive the honor or do you want to comment? I'll do a short comment. I've taken a good look at Biden's voting record, and he's been definitely more dovish in the past 15 years than he was in 2001 when he voted for war. I certainly don't trust him on this issue, though, because he did vote for us to go to war with Iraq. And the Democratic Party has been up in arms about everything with Russia trying to just scream, you know, we need a cold war with Russia. Everything is hysterics with them. So, no, I don't trust that Biden's foreign policy would not push us into war at some point. I'm glad it's Biden, not Hillary. That's the most, that's the nicest thing that I could say about the DNC right now. Right. Thank you, Angela. And here is a question for Buddy that I guess picks up on a slight disagreement or maybe a major disagreement that you and Ilya just had. Why would the GOP move away from Trump's ideas that got them elected? Why would they move away from Trump's ideas that got them elected? Or indeed, as Ilya was saying, if Trump is triumphant in this coming election, why wouldn't they just embrace those ideas in the next election? But the simple answer is we have to bring in voters who agree more with our ideas than the so-called Trumpist ideas within the Republican coalition in order to move the Republicans in our direction. That's the reason. I don't think what is being called the Trumpist ideas, I don't think they're going to go away. We have big alliances of disparate interest groups in both of the political parties. And so the Republican party, both the Republicans and Democrats, include protectionists and also some free traders. The Republicans have more free traders. And we need to make it even more in order to move it in that direction. And not, every libertarian that goes off in their own direction and has their own political thing independent from the Republicans is one more person who's not trying to move the Republicans in that direction. Do you want to comment on that, Ilya? Just briefly, if the Republicans can get libertarian votes in their current state to the extent that they even think they need libertarian votes, which it seems like most of them think that they don't, but to the extent that they think that they do, there's no incentive for them to change to the extent that libertarians can affect things by voting, it's by any given election voting for whichever party of those that has a chance to win is the one that is least bad from their point of view. If on the issue like free trade, you end up voting for a party that is actually more protectionist, then that more protectionist party has even more incentive to discount whatever we might think regarding the free trade issue. I think that's pretty clear. I do want to comment, Angela. Oh, yes. Libertarian messaging will be drowned out under Trump's populism. If libertarians rush right now to join the GOP, all we're going to do is be labeled Republicans, GOP people, every insult under the sun that is attributed to Donald Trump. It's not the right time to try to charge the cockpit on that. That was Ron Paul's run and that's not coming back. If we get Ron Paul 2.0, fantastic and I'll revisit that debate with you, but I'm telling you that that is the only situation where I would give any respect to the notion of trying to rally behind Republicans. It's not going to work out for us right now. Okay. Well, that concludes the Q&A portion and we're now going to go to the summations and in the same order. We'll give you each seven and a half minutes to summarize. You can take less than that if you'd like. Max, it's seven and a half. Ilya, tell us once again why we Libertarians should vote for Joe Biden. So I think I laid out the main issues in my initial presentation. There has been very little attempt to even begin to refute most of those. So I'll just remind people of the points about immigration, trade, property rights, civil liberties, government spending that I mentioned earlier. All of these are huge issues. All of those are issues where it is very likely 90% or more that things will be better if Biden wins that if Trump wins, they might be better still if Joe Jorgensen were to become president. But she probably pretty obviously is not going to happen. I would like to briefly comment on the immigration issue, some of the points that Francis made in that it is not true that Trump failed to cut immigration even before the coronavirus pandemic. To the contrary, he had reduced refugee admissions, for example, from some 100,000 a year to almost nothing. And that happened even before the pandemic began. He also cut many categories of legal immigration and, of course, ramped up deportations, family separations, and other kinds of brutal measures. You can say, well, that happens with any kind of crime that there's some kind of family separation. However, when people are convicted of a normal crime, they at least get normal due process. There is no such due process with family separation under Trump's policy. Moreover, the only crime here, if there's a crime at all, is the crime of crossing the border, which criminal code is a minor misdemeanor. There's no other misdemeanor to my knowledge where people are routinely separated from their families in such a brutal way. Usually for most misdemeanors, you get a small fine or community service or the like. So the brutality of this policy is enormous. And it's a departure from previous policies, even though previous policies were very bad. And I mentioned earlier how this is a threat to the liberty of natives, citizens, and not just to data immigrants. This issue of, well, the entire world could come into the U.S. I think this, like many things, where people are allowed to live should be determined by free markets and individual choice. As libertarians, that is what we should be committed to. Under the bogeyman of everybody would come in, that seems very unlikely. It didn't happen in the first 150 years of American history when we had mostly entirely free migration from the world. And limitations of housing and employment markets could also constrain that. But even if you don't support me in wanting a presumption of free migration, there's still room for much more freedom of migration that exists under Trump, where right now there's virtually none. And he and his advisors have made it clear that they want to extend that indefinitely. Even Miller is his main advisor on immigration issues, and Miller has made it very clear that that's what he wants to do. The issue of the war on drugs is also, I think, significant, and earlier, why the Democrats are generally better on this than the Republicans with the issue of war. Again, I think the issue here is that Trump, because of his ignorance and velocosity, is more of a risk than Biden, though I don't claim that Biden is risk-free. I also think, and this is a broader debate to be had, perhaps in another time, that I don't fully agree with those of a libertarian disabled. We should have a neo-isolationist policy where we never use military action unless we are first attacked. They think there are other situations where it could be justified and leaving the field to the world's authoritarian powers like Russia and China and others doesn't strike me as the best way to go. Even though I also don't think that we should have just massive wars anytime. We think something is a problem. And I think Biden can strike at least some reasonable balance on that. And that is, in fact, where his positions have been over the last 10 or 15 years, though I certainly don't expect he will be anywhere near perfect on that. Finally, on the two-party system, and what libertarians should have promoted ideas, I think the act of voting is separable from most of our other activities because it has this characteristic where only two parties have a real chance of winning and any one vote has so little chance of making a difference. Therefore, it makes sense to cast a vote for the party of the two that have a real chance of winning, that is the less bad. And in most cases it won't make a difference, but in the small chance that it does make a difference, that's the only way to have any kind of payoff. On the other hand, there are many other things that we can do, promote libertarian ideas, make contributions to organizations, engage in issues specific activism, do scholarship and research and writing and speaking. Those kind of popularize libertarian ideas through society and make them more accepted and therefore change over time the incentives of the major political parties where libertarians have succeeded in doing these things. However, it has generally not been by working through a third party, it has either been by working in the major parties or outside the party system altogether. That's how Milton Friedman, Hayek, Ayn Rand, the drug legalization movement, the school choice movement and many other libertarian causes have had a measure of success over the years. And we should talk more about how to do those things, but when we're talking about the narrow issue of who to vote for in a particular election, I think sadly there is not a better alternative than voting for the lesser evil. And in this particular case, the lesser evil despite his flaws is indeed Joe Biden. It's certainly not Donald Trump. Thank you. Okay, under seven and a half minutes, but Angela, you have seven and a half minutes to summarize the case for George Robinson. Take it away, Angela. I want to see liberty achieved in our lifetime, and I admire everyone who is fighting for freedom in whatever way they can. There are some libertarians who are trying to force political change through the two major parties, and there are some who have folded to their own cynicism and discouraged others from any political action altogether. But there is a third choice. It's using the libertarian party and its presidential candidate to educate people and win hearts and minds. The only way to achieve libertarian values is to promote libertarian values. We will never promote libertarianism by promoting the values of Biden or Trump, especially in today's political climate. We use our presidential candidate to spread the values of liberty, offer voters a principal third choice, and force the other two parties to pay attention to libertarian issues. Why not make voting meaningful by giving it to Joe and working to get 5% of the popular vote? You'll guarantee ballot access for several states for the libertarian party, make headlines and get liberty all over the news. This is also a vote where principal non-voting libertarians can be assured that their vote will not result in an act of aggression against the others. The only way to beat Marxism is with liberty, not with national socialism or populism. And Joe is an excellent candidate who don't protest against a candidate who's libertarian by throwing your vote behind the biggest collectivist monsters of modern human civilization. It's understandable we hold Joe to a much higher standard than we hold the other two candidates because we care about her messaging because she's supposed to be our beacon of liberty. But the reality is that no human being or candidate is perfect in everyone's eyes. Ron Paul is the paragon of liberty. There are still some people who don't like him because he was personally pro-life. Would you rather support someone who is wildly unprincipled in order to cast a spite vote or would you rather support someone who is highly principled that you disagree with on one or two minor points? Right now, hope isn't connected to a landslide win at the polls. It's connected to pushing the Overton window in the direction of freedom. And we need your support to send hope out to the masses. Collectivism under the banner of the left-right paradigm is one of the strongest poisons Americans have ever drunk. Both parties are toxic collectivist tools that are pushing this country down a path of socialism. One claims to be slightly less socialist than the other. The other claims to be more socialist, but nicer. Reject them. Never forget. The reign of death that was brought on by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao would never have happened if people hadn't discarded their love of liberty and abandoned individual rights for the sake of tribalism. Civilization has never been advanced by a collectivist dictatorship, and both Trump and Biden suppress innovation with regulatory capture or economic destabilization or the threat of nationalization. Both of them and their parties have pitted friends and families against each other and now hatred boils over and politics has bled into a culture war. But as libertarians we shouldn't be so easily fooled to take up arms in the wrong fight. During the past 40 years, for example, federal gun rights have been eroded under Republican administrations. Federal spending and debt have soared. The dollar is basically just an empty promise, and Donald Trump is directly responsible for the escalation of these things during the past three and a half years. Democrats like Biden have brought us disastrous socialized medicine and they're ready to try it again. The Democratic Party has dragged Biden to the far left and they're trying to drag the rest of us there with them or destroy us along the way by distracting us with racial tension and class warfare. Throughout the past 12 years, libertarians and the Ron Paul remnant has screamed in frustration. Where is the anti-war left? Well, I screamed back. Where are the anti-war libertarians? Where are the Infa Fed rallies? Where are the tax revolts? Have we accepted unending war and socialism and just given up all hope? Is it acceptable to use our votes to re-elect a war maker who destroys the dollars and our civil liberties? I say no. It's time to shift our paradigm and let go of all this two-party baggage so we can fully embrace freedom. Don't give in to this evil. Just proceed ever more boldly against it. Don't believe the lies of the Trump versus Biden fight. Economic freedom and personal liberty are not divisible and neither Trump nor Biden cares about the damage our foreign policy is doing overseas. What if our foreign policy of the past 12 years hasn't served our national security interests or our interests at home? When will we stop learning to meddle in the affairs of others? When will we stop punishing people overseas? When will we stop torture, enhanced interrogation, spying, spending, regime change? When will we finally stop inflating and borrowing? What if we stop being gaslit by 40-chest propaganda and the argument that we should vote for the lesser of two evils? What if we just stopped voting for evil? What if we finally just embrace liberty and let go of our obsession with trying to wrestle power back from the jaws of a totalitarian republican monster that doesn't care about us? This is your call to action. It's time to redirect political dialogue with principled radicalism. Radical freedom takes all forms. It can wear a suit and tie, have a normal haircut. It can put a libertarian sticker on its minivan, wear a vote for Joe button. Radicalism can attend a protest or dodge its taxes. No one is interested or excited when you tell them you're voting for Biden or Trump. No one is intrigued when you tell them you're too apathetic to vote or that the system is rigged. Everyone already knows. People are interested when you tell them that you're voting for the candidate who wants to abolish the IRS and bring the troops home. People pay attention when you tell them you support a candidate who wants to restore our Second Amendment rights and end unconstitutional spying and torture of American citizens. It's not about voting for Trump. There is no go big or go home. We need to go big and vote libertarian because this is our home. We need to recapture the narrative of what it means to be free and reinvigorate our party, our message and our principles. Let's bring back in the Fed rallies. Let's bring back the anti-war movement and that's why I'm asking you to vote for Joe Jorgensen in 2020. Thank you, Angela. Frances Minton, you have your seven and a half minutes to make your final case for Donald Trump. Take it away, Frances. I just want to start with dealing with a couple of the points that Ilya made that I ran out of time to address in my prior presentations. On immigration, Ilya finally made it clear in his closing that he's really in favor of pretty much free immigration. If you're an economist and you look at immigration, you quickly realize that the thing that can increase welfare in the world the most, the single transaction is to bring immigrant into the United States. They raise their incomes tremendously. They raise our incomes tremendously. It seems so attractive, but the idea that we can have completely free and open immigration is just ridiculous. We would have four billion people trying to come here. We couldn't possibly deal with it. And so then the question is how many are you going to have? You have to draw a line somewhere. Is it going to be a million a year, a million and a half or half a million? And once you have a line, then the line has to be enforced, because if it's not enforced, there is no line. And you can't say that you treat these people harshly. They have to be arrested and deported. That's what it means to have a line. I'm sorry. I don't like it. I know lots of immigrants. I know lots of illegal immigrants living in New York City, or at least ones I pretty sure are illegal. And they're extremely nice people and hardworking people. But unfortunately, there is really no alternative to it. And you can get a little more or a little less. But that's why I basically don't count that as any particular major negative on Trump. We're going to have about the same amount of immigration either way. I think it would be more with Biden, but it would be illegal. They would be much more open to illegal immigrants, Biden and his people. But that's not okay. That's not what Congress has said. The war on drugs, neither party is any good on the war on drugs. I would like to see the war on drugs done away with. I think the Democrats are just as bad. And in fact, Biden is the guy who supported the 1994 or approximately 94 act that increased all the penalties. And Trump is the guy who supported a reduction of that. That doesn't mean that Trump is anywhere near perfect on this. He certainly supports a vigorous enforcement of the drug laws. But if anything, he's better than Biden. Okay. Those are just a couple of particular points that I wanted to address. I come back to my main point is which is you have to pick between the two major parties and a commenter at my blog put it very well a couple of days ago. What the commenter said was voting for Trump is like forcing yourself to eat your broccoli, particularly if you don't like broccoli. It's very distasteful. But voting for Biden is like eating a gigantic dog turd. And I think that's very well put. So there is there is absolutely a worst case scenario here, which Ms. McCartle and I think she's done a very nice job here, but that she hasn't dealt with. She wants to see the libertarian party get 5% of the vote. Well, with the libertarian party getting 5% of the vote, that could very well put us right into a modified repeat of the 1912 election, where one or two or three swing states get thrown from Trump to Biden by a division of the vote. And now we get Biden when we could have had Trump because we voted for purity. Unfortunately, the perfect is the enemy of the good, just like the Democrats are all are all now trying to compete over who can be more pure and canceling the ones that aren't. The Republicans and the libertarians can't afford to play that game. It's a loser's game. As much as I think that Wilson was the worst president in US history, Biden could well be worse. I think you're just kidding yourself if you think that Biden is any kind of a moderate. And I think that's completely that concept is completely disproved by the Biden Sanders unit unity platform that came out a few days ago and that we've discussed a few times in this debate. If you have any doubt about it, you ought to read that 110-page document, which is joined by every crazy left-winger and big government person in the country. This is the government takeover of everything. Fast new spending, fast new taxes, fast new regulation, fast new energy costs. It's also the ascendancy of the woke. The people who think that believing in freedom is hate speech and racism and white supremacy. That's Biden's people. It means Supreme Court justices who will approve suppressing the speech of anyone who does not agree. With Trump as president, there's at least some possibility of pushing back against the purges from social media, from academia, and from the media of all dissenting voices, such as yours. They want to purge you. With Biden as president and the woke in control, the move to silence libertarian voices will accelerate. So Trump may not be our favorite, but he's our only option for pushing back against the very, very maligned forces for which Biden is the current figurehead and the frontman. We need to vote for Trump. In fact, more than that, we need to try to get him as big a victory as possible, hopefully a landslide so that he'll have people in Congress and he can get some libertarian oriented things accomplished. Indeed, if we really care about libertarianism, it's our duty. Thank you. Okay. Well, that was under your allotted time. Thank you, Francis. We want to thank all three of you. I learned a lot. I think our audience learned a lot from each of you. Jane, would you please take over and supervise the voting? And now I want to announce the winner. First of all, I do want to say, guys, that setting aside the Oxford style vote, in the final vote, Joe Jorgensen got 60.3%. Now, that's not the Oxford style vote, but I only want to tell you guys that Joe Jorgensen would be winning the presidential election with 60.3% of the popular vote, had it only been taken among the 200 listeners we had this evening. So I want that firmly understood, Francis Anilia and Angela, you can certainly crow on that basis. And then I guess I also want to add that Joe Jorgensen also won the Oxford style vote. She went from 27.8% of the vote to 60.3%. She picked up 32.5%. Now, coming in second was Trump, who picked up 3%. Biden lost a couple of points. And so he came in third. But it was a fairly close race between Biden and Trump. But I do want to repeat that Angela gets the Tutsi roll. And, Ilya, I loved your presentation. Francis, I loved yours, but you came in third. Francis, you came in second. I now want to ask you if you're all on the tube. Francis, who do you think will probably win the presidential election? We're going to have to have an election among 60 million voters, not among the 200 this evening. Who do you think will probably win, Francis, the election? The election is among 100 million and more. Sorry, yes. I think Trump's going to win. Ilya, who do you think is going to win? I think it's most likely to be Biden. That's the conventional wisdom, but the conventional wisdom on such things I think is right most of the time. And Angela, who do you think is going to win? I have no idea until I can find out how many more riots we're going to have until then. Coronavirus, I think right now it's barely Trump in the lead. But if he fumbles a ball before, then I think that he could slip. We'll just, we'll see how many more people he throws a knapsack over on the West Coast. Okay. You guys still apparently disagree about everything, including the future. So again, thank you all. All three of you have been great. This has been a real pleasure and good night to everyone out there. We will be back in August.