 I think that the emphasis should be on getting us back to our roots as a country. What do we believe in as a basic set of principles and really what this country is about is liberalism in the classical sense. The idea that people should be able to free, should be free to make their own decisions about their lives and government to the extent possible should just stay out of it. Justin Amash was a Republican congressman from Michigan, once described by Politico as the new Ron Paul in Congress because of his willingness to buck party line votes on principle. He switched his affiliation to the LP in his fifth and final term, making him the party's highest office holder since its founding in 1971. He explored a run for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination in 2020 before changing his mind, paving the way for the nomination of longtime Libertarian Party member Joe Jorgensen. Amash was in Reno, Nevada during the Libertarian Party's national convention, during which the Mises Caucus took control over every leadership position. Amash is not a member of the Caucus but plans to remain in the party. At one point during the convention, he read quotes from a book on the subject of political liberalism. Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man. It would be practicable only in a world of angels and saints. Liberalism is not anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism. Alright, I'll read you some more quotes. Every single one of those quotes is from Mises, one of my heroes. In this book, liberalism, that's just one book. Amash says he read the Mises excerpts not because he agrees with every word or to criticize anarchists but to point out that to compete on the national stage, the Libertarian Party needs to appeal to more than just purists libertarians. If Ludwig von Mises or Justin Amash, or pretty much anyone in this room, is not libertarian enough for you, it's not going to work. At the end of his speech, Amash received a standing ovation. Reason sat down with him in Reno to ask about his views of the Mises Caucus, his vision for the future of the party, and his plans for 2024 and beyond. Justin Amash, thanks for talking to reason. Thanks, Nick. Libertarian. A libertarian is a person who believes that the government should not be making coercive decisions and people should be making decisions for their own lives. So we believe above all in human cooperation. That's how I would frame it. Human cooperation is at the center of it. And the reason we believe in things like decentralizing power, the reason we believe in divided powers, separation of powers, is because we want people to be able to make decisions for themselves, not because it is to their own benefit alone, but because it's the benefit of all of society for that to happen. We're a diverse country. We have people with lots of ideas who come from lots of backgrounds. As we go about our days, we learn lots of things that other people don't learn. We know things as human beings that are inherent to us, because we exist in a certain time, in a certain place, and we learn those things. And when you centralize power, you're basically saying some outside entity that doesn't know anything about you is going to make decisions, but this really limits our ability to work together. If you have some outside party planning for you, it throws off our own plans. So I'd like to see us and what libertarianism envisions is people working together using their own knowledge and that voluntary human cooperation is built on this idea of diversity and decentralized power. We are at the Reno Reset, the Libertarian Party Convention in 2022. The Mises Caucus has run the table. They now run the party. What are your thoughts about that? I think we have to wait and see what happens. When someone comes in and they're promising a whole bunch of new stuff, I think you have to give them the opportunity and see how it goes. And I think it's too early to make an assessment. What's your sense of what the Mises Caucus wants to do? I think they mostly want more energy. So there are people who come to the Mises Caucus for different reasons. But what seems to unite them is this feeling that the party doesn't have enough energy, that there was this Ron Paul movement at one point that brought a lot of people in to the Liberty movement and they want to recreate that within the Libertarian Party. I don't know that it works the same way. There's a lot of difference between having a figure like Ron Paul and having a movement within a party that doesn't have that same figurehead. So I think it's a lot harder to recreate than they might imagine. And they're also in a position where they have to run an organization now. So it's not quite the same thing as running a campaign for president where you get a whole bunch of energy behind a candidate. But I think that's what they're mostly hoping for. What is the primary function of the Libertarian Party? To organize people to win elections. I don't think there's any reason to have a political party just for activism, which is why I've actually objected to the idea that the Libertarian Party is a movement. There is a Libertarian movement, but I don't think the Libertarian Party should be the center of that movement. The Libertarian Party is here to bring people together from that movement, from activist organizations, from individuals who are going out there and making Libertarianism something that is appealing to the masses. But when it comes to the party itself, we have to be about winning elections. If we're not about winning elections, then what are we doing? I think it's an error to say, well, we've tried that method. Now we have to try something different. I don't think that that's what the Libertarian Party has been doing. I don't think the Libertarian Party has been organizing people to win elections for the past 50 years. They've had some small successes, but you can tell that a party that's only gotten to about 3% in any presidential race has not really done the job of organizing people to win elections. I also think that the idea of turning it into an activist organization will not be successful because there are functions that a political party has to engage in and activism is something very different. What's an activist activity and then what is a kind of political party activity? When you have a political party, I think you have to bring people in who already agree with you. And there are millions of Americans who agree with Libertarian principles. They're not going to agree on every point in the platform. They're not going to agree on every principle that every other Libertarian has or every issue that every other Libertarian has, but they generally agree with Libertarian ideas. Many of them might not even call themselves Libertarians, but if you ask them to choose between the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and the Libertarian Party, they're choosing the Libertarian Party. Those people are out there. We can get those people. That's the function of a political party. Bring those people in who you don't have to win over and convince them of the principles of Mises or Hayek or the founding fathers or whoever. Bring them in. They already agree with you on these things. An activist group is going out there and saying to people who have very different views, hey, this is why Libertarianism is better than what you're doing. This is why it's better than socialism. This is why it's better than conservatism or better than nationalism and trying to convert people into Libertarians. I think these are very different functions and they can be at odds. If a party is spending all of its time and energy on trying to convert people, I think it loses sight of the bigger picture, which is there are people out there, we have elections in front of us, we have to bring these people together. These things can work together. They can be complementary, but I don't think they should be done by the same organization. So I applaud Libertarians who are out there working on activist groups, trying to build out a Libertarian movement. And I think that's important. And we want those people to come into the party, but I don't think the party needs to be the center of that messaging or should be the center of that messaging. The Mises Caucus has also talked about getting rid of language in the platform denouncing racism and bigotry. Do you think that makes sense? I don't think it makes sense to get rid of denouncing racism and bigotry. Is it an essential element in any party platform? It's not necessarily a position on legislative policy, for example, or governmental policy. On the other hand, removing it makes some kind of statement about what your values are. And I don't think there's any benefits for removing that, and I think it will probably hurt us with a lot of people who might otherwise say, this is a party that endorses that. We want to be clear that we don't endorse it. And a lot of times, especially people on the left, will say that because the Libertarian party is a party about freedom, freedom of choice, freedom of opinion, that means we endorse bigotry. Because inevitably, when you have freedom in any society, there are people who are going to say and do bigoted things and racist things. And I think we should be clear that just because we support freedom doesn't mean we endorse what's done with freedom. As you've seen people associated with the Mises Caucus messaging, are they getting it right or is this going to become a problem? I think bolder messaging is important. But we don't need edglording. We don't need posting stuff just to troll people or saying outrageous statements just to get attention. There are some people within this party who think that if you just say the most outrageous thing possible and you get a lot of attention for it, that that's a positive thing. It's almost like any news is good news for you. It doesn't matter. Any publicity is good publicity. And I don't agree with that. I think if you put stuff out there, you may get some attention for it. It's true that major media outlets may cover it, but if they're covering it because you said something crazy, that doesn't help your program. Before the convention started, the Southern Poverty Law Center released an article that was titled, Mises Caucus, Could It Sway the Libertarian Party to the Hard Right? Its opening sentence is, high-profile Mises Caucus members espouse hateful rhetoric and collaborate with white nationalists and individuals linked to former President Donald Trump. Do you think that's an accurate read of the Mises Caucus? And if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don't think it's an accurate read of the Mises Caucus on the whole. Most of the people within the Mises Caucus are young, activist types. A lot of them are new to libertarianism. In other words, they're not even that familiar with all of the principles, all of the philosophy, but they know there's something wrong with the way this country is being managed at the governmental level. They don't like what's going on in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, and they're here because they want to bring that energy to something. It's about channeling that energy in the right direction. I don't think they're coming here because they're nationalists or bigoted or any of that stuff. That's not to say that there aren't people within the Libertarian Party, just as there are within the Democratic Party and Republican Party and throughout the whole world who are bigoted and racist. There are people like that, and I think we should call out people like that, and we should denounce those kinds of statements. But do I think that the Caucus as a whole is like that? I don't think so. Yesterday you gave this an important speech in the middle of the convention, and you started reading without attribution a bunch of quotes from Ludwig von Mises, the namesake of the Mises Caucus. What were some of the quotes you read, and then what was the response? Well, I read some of his quotes that I thought would be perceived as being maybe a bit to the left, or a bit inconsistent with a lot of modern Libertarian thought within the Party. And I wanted to make the point that we sometimes are jumping all over each other and at the same time we are praising individuals like Mises who will say some of the same things that are said by people we're jumping all over. So we need to be more respectful of each other. We need to think more about the breadth of Libertarianism, that it's a much broader philosophy than a lot of people think, that it encompasses a lot of ideas and a lot of principles, and sometimes Libertarians get things wrong. Sometimes they have views that don't always, when taken out of context, seem to mesh with other things, just like any individuals in any party or any philosophy. So we need to be careful about taking things out of context, misrepresenting things, looking at a tweet and saying, well, that person's some kind of leftist or that person's some kind of right-wing nationalist, just because they said something in a tweet that we don't necessarily agree with or we don't understand the full context of. What happened during your speech after you laid out these Mises quotes? What happened? So as I was giving the quotes, people started to boo, which is what I expected. I expected they would boo the quotes, especially where Mises calls for the necessity of the state or calls for a world state. There's another quote where he said it wasn't shameful to be ruled by others. These are things that I think a lot of Libertarians within the party would find troubling. They're not necessarily troubling when taken within the context of all of Mises's work. But you have to understand the full breadth of what he's saying to get the context. And I just wanted people to see that, hey, we're too quick to jump on each other. Here's a guy we hold up as a hero within our philosophy. And yet, if he were here today, he might be called a woke leftist or ridiculed or rejected, or they might call him blue-pilled. Do you feel comfortable in the Libertarian party as the Mises caucus takes over? Yeah, I do. We have to see how things go. I don't think they were going great under the previous administration or previous ones before that. We have a lot of work to do as a party. That's not to say I don't respect and appreciate a lot of the work that was put into it. But we have a lot more work to do. And it's not going to be easy to get this party on track. So it's an uphill battle. I want to give them the opportunity. You talked yesterday of essentially getting up to 33%. You're kind of saying the Republicans have a third of the electorate. The Democrats, the Libertarians need to be at that level. Yeah, as a rough estimate, I would say that the two old parties have about a third of the electorate each. What are the immediate steps that the LP should be doing? I think we need to get our messaging right. We need to make sure that we have a message that shows people we care about them and that is broadly appealing. If we're just messaging to 1% of the population, well, that's what kind of party we're going to have. We're going to have a party that is 1% of the population. We have to accept the idea that there will be people in our party who don't agree with us on everything. The way I look at it is if you divided up the country into thirds and you said a third are Republican, a third are Democratic, and a third are Libertarian, we want all the people who would be closer to us than to the other two parties. We want all those people. Where does that messaging take place? Well, I think a lot of it takes place through activism outside the party. But you have to get into very basic messaging. When you look at the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, you couldn't even tell me what their platforms are. They're not arguing over the details of anything. They are centered around larger-than-life figures like Donald Trump. I'm not sure the Democrats have this kind of figure right now, but they have in the past with people like Barack Obama. And usually that's what drives those parties. Having some figures, some very central ideas that drive everything. And I think we've gotten too bogged down in the small details of everything. And we need to present a simpler, clearer message about where we stand. And to me, the difference between us and the other parties is we believe in liberalism and they believe in illiberalism. And to me, that couldn't be clearer. I mean, it's clearer now than ever. They increasingly want to control people and dictate to people. And we believe that people should be allowed to make their own decisions in their lives. Do you want to be that person in the Libertarian Party, the figure that is the main kind of messaging or messenger? I don't know that I have to be that figure. I do feel like I am in a position to be a figure like that because of my background, because I served in Congress. I understand what goes on in Washington. I have more training and skill in this area than a lot of people within the party, because there just haven't been that many people who have been elected to higher office within the party. Do you think the Libertarian Party responded properly to COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates? I think for the most part, they responded properly. Whether they got the message out there or not, that's a different question. I don't think enough people out there knew what the Libertarian Party's stance was. I don't think there were many people who were drawn to the Libertarian Party during this time, because you had many Republicans, for example, out there who were in prominent positions. Rand Paul is a good example of one who is out there on the national stage making the case for why we shouldn't be for the lockdowns or why vaccine mandates were a bad idea or why the universal masking might be problematic. So there were Republicans who were out there doing that, making the case in a stronger way than the Libertarian Party. But part of that is the fact that we're a small party. What should the Libertarian Party position on abortion be? I think we should have a neutral stance on it. As many people know, I'm pro-life. But I think it would be a bad idea for the Libertarian Party to take either a pro-choice position or a pro-life position. We already have two parties that are basically completely one way or the other. The Republican Party, if you're not pro-life, you basically can't be in the party. In the Democratic Party, you basically have to be pro-choice. And increasingly, these parties are taking very extreme positions on it, where the Republican Party is going closer and closer to conception, making it illegal. And the Democratic Party is moving more toward you can have an abortion all the way up to very end. So from my perspective, I don't see why the Libertarian Party should get into the middle of all that. We should say we're a party that will have a common-sense perspective about this. We understand there are rights on each side of this issue. There's the right of the unborn child. There's the right of the mother. We take that all into consideration and we're not going to be all one way or the other. We understand that there's a balance that must be met because you have conflicting rights. And this is why we have a political process. We're going to make our case to the public on an individual basis. If I run for office, I'll say what I believe. Other candidates can say what they believe. And you let the public decide. And it may actually shape some of your views on this based on the public viewpoint of what's appropriate. What should the Libertarian Party position on immigration make? I think we have to have as close to an open system of immigration as possible. You're not going to get there completely because there are going to be a lot of Americans who push back and say we have to have some security and that's understandable, especially because you have a lot of government involvement in our lives now. So when people come into this country, there are various benefits that are given out. Now, many of us who believe strongly in immigration would say that immigrants provide much more than they take out in any benefits. But it's a case that has to be made. So I would like to see us get as close to an open policy as possible where people can come into this country and live their lives and they're not stopped at the border simply because they're from another country. And let's see what happens. You were elected as a kind of tea party in a wave of tea party activism. Over a decade ago, the tea party seems to have faded. Occupied Wall Street seemed to have faded too, but it's kind of making a comeback. But more broadly, the libertarian movement seems to have kind of faded in a significant way with the emergence of Trump. Can the LP regain some kind of mojo? I think it can, but it does have to have figures who are driving it. This idea that it's all going to happen by running a bunch of county commissioners or county commissioner candidates or local candidates is not really plausible in my mind. Any big movement that's going to be successful has to have some figures at the national level or at least at the state level running for governor, running for Senate who are making an impact. So I think that kind of energy can be brought back, but it's not just going to manifest itself because we're running a bunch of local candidates and talking about local issues. Those things are very important. I want to be clear. All of the community work that libertarians do is very important, but I don't think that's going to create the movement. If we want to build a new movement, we have to have those activist organizations outside the party working on that. And we have to have figures perhaps within the party who are running campaigns that are driving that energy. Flash forward to 2024. What would success look like for the libertarian party between now and then? I think we have to have infrastructure in place so that we can run high-profile candidates in some of the big races. I do think we have to have a presidential candidate who is high-profile and can make a real impact, not a 1% or 2% impact, but an impact that is upwards of 10%, 15%. Because the party is not going to be put on the map until you get to that point, until you have national figures who can reach something like 15%. That's the hardest point to get to. Once you've reached something like 15%, getting to 30% is a lot easier. It's the first 15% that's very hard. So we have to have those figures out there and we have to have the infrastructure to allow those people to get to that point. And to me, that is a metric. If after a couple years, there's not really infrastructure in place, there's not resources coming in to help our candidates, I think we're in trouble then. How will you make a decision whether or not you're going to run for the LP presidential nomination? Well, I haven't decided on anything and I haven't really thought about whether I would run or not at this point, but I can say that I'm interested in running for office again in the future. For me, there would have to be the right kind of infrastructure in place. What do you mean by infrastructure? You have to have a party that is behind you that is a viable party. I'm not interested in running as a Republican or as a Democrat. So if I'm going to run in the future as a libertarian, I want to know that I have a party behind me that is viable. So that's like ballot access in every state, local people that can motivate messaging and voter turnout and things like that. You have to have the whole infrastructure because one person can't do it by himself or by herself. You have to have a whole team of people. You have to have a 50 state strategy. You have to have the resources coming in, the donors who are available to make it happen. And for me to run for office, it's not just a vanity thing. I'm not interested in running for office so I can say I was the libertarian nominee and I got 3% or 4%. If I run for office, I want to get 20%, 25%. I'd like to win the election, but if you're not going to win the election, you at least want to put the party on the map. And in order to do that, you have to have the infrastructure. What do you think are the subpopulations or the groups out there that are the ones that libertarians really should be capturing or paying a lot of attention to? I think we don't do enough to reach out to black Americans, to Hispanic Americans, to immigrants. I think there are lots of people out there who would find libertarian principles very appealing, who already have very libertarian views and could be brought in. I know that during my time in Congress, I dealt a lot with people in the NAACP and we had very good relationships. We didn't agree on every issue, but they certainly appreciated a lot of what I was doing to advance civil liberties, civil rights, making sure that we had criminal justice reform and addressing some of the issues that affected their communities, including a lot of the police actions that we've seen and police abuses. Those are people we can reach and bring into the party and I think we haven't done a very good job of that. What are the three priorities in terms of issues that the libertarian party or libertarian should be hammering? Well, I do think we need to talk about the monetary system. We are dealing with massive inflation right now and this is a real opportunity for us to bring people in to help them understand how inflation is happening, that it's a creation of the Federal Reserve, it's a creation of inflation of the monetary supply. So let's teach them about that and bring them into the party through that. That means we're gonna have to have, again, activist organizations working on that issue. Money is also an important issue in the sense of government control because as we saw in Canada and as we see in China with their social credit system, you run the risk when you have the government controlling so much of the means of exchange, which is money, that they can just shut you out of society. They can turn you off basically by telling the banks, hey, don't work with this person anymore, which is why I believe so strongly in decentralizing money, decentralization generally as a concept. I believe strongly in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, things that are outside of government control because I think these will be very big issues going forward. Another issue I think we should talk about is freedom of speech. I don't think Republicans or Democrats care about the freedom of speech and we have an opportunity to say we are the party of free speech. We're the party of free expression. We want people to share their ideas. We are the party of diversity because we believe people should be making decisions about their lives and be able to talk about those things and challenge each other. We don't believe that one person or one group of people should just sit in government and tell everyone how to think and how to behave. So I think that's another issue that I would really focus on. Do you have a third? Boy, there are so many issues. So I think war is another one. We see what's going on now in Ukraine and my concern is we're increasingly creeping into another war without any authorization. We just got out of this long war in Afghanistan. There are still wars going on around the world all related in many respects, at least the ones that the United States is involved in are related in many respects to 9-11 and the authorization that happened after 9-11. So we need to really work on explaining to the American people how these wars have not benefited the United States and to the extent that we're going to be involved in wars overseas, we had better have the American people behind it. You should take votes in Congress. You should be on the record as a representative or as a senator to say that you support the war and this is what you're going to do. We shouldn't be leading Americans slowly into war and then once it's too late and we're fully involved saying, well, now there's nothing we can do about it. We're stuck with it. Do you worry that Donald Trump is still, you know, kind of the son that everybody is revolving around, even though he's not on social media, he's however many years old and will be that much older in 2024, but until he vacates, is there, you know, can something else emerge? Within the Republican Party, no. I think that they're stuck with Donald Trump for the time being and they have candidates who seem to be pretty talented. I might have a lot of disagreements with them, but Ron DeSantis, for example, seems to be a pretty talented governor in many ways and I think he's just stuck in a holding pattern because of someone like Donald Trump. And the Democrats, I think, don't really have a farm team. They don't have much of anything going on. So you are in this world where it's Donald Trump versus whatever bland candidate the Democrats put forward and that's a real opportunity for libertarians. So we do need to take that opportunity and we should be happy about the fact as a party at least that everything does seem to be revolving around Donald Trump because I think he alienates so much of the country that that is a real opening for us and the Democrats have such a weak team that that's an opening for us. I think we need to be pulling from the right and the left. I mean, I don't view libertarianism as a right or left philosophy. It can pull from both of those sides. We're a full spectrum philosophy and I'd like us to bring in people right now and we have that opportunity. This is maybe the chance of a lifetime over the next couple of years to bring people into the party.