We Can Politely Disagree:

Sensible Answers to Tough Questions, Part 1

Having urged civil disagreement between candidates, I now enumerate a
few points where Mary Ruwart and I take different stands on issues.
The following are issues that have significant national interest: The
National debt. National defense. Climate Change. Pollution. Our
answers differ a great deal. Which do you prefer? That choice is up
to you.

Dr. Ruwart describes herself as being from the libertarian wing of
the Libertarian Party. I view myself as being from the centrist wing
of the Libertarian Party: I’m not Republican Lite, and I’m not an
anarchist.

#1 What is the Libertarian response to handling the National Debt?

*Ruwart* (pp. 91-92, Short Answers to the Tough Questions by Mary J.
Ruwart): The national debt represents loans to government secured by
its willingness to tax (steal from) its citizens. Thus, some
Libertarians view buying government bonds as encouraging a thief and

have no qualms about repudiating the debt. Others believe that
government property (including over 40% of the U.S. landmass) should
be liquidated to repay the debt, wholly or in part.

*Phillies*: Three choices for solving the national debt are paying
it, selling assets, and repudiating it. I say that we should
eliminate the National debt by paying it.

Can we? It’s exactly like paying off a house mortgage. If you want to
pay off a mortgage over 30 years, your monthly payment on the
principal starts near a tenth of a percent of initial debt. We have
nine trillion

dollars of national debt. A budget surplus around $100 billion a year
and constant future payments makes our funded national debt go away by
2040. What about alternative solutions?

Sell Federal lands? That won’t work. Why? America has around a
billion acres of Federal land. Parts of that land, such as the Grand
Canyon, simply will not be sold. To pay off the national debt by
selling the

rest, we’d need to clear around $10,000 an acre. In contrast, in
eastern Kansas and Western Missouri, real estate ads show farmland
for one or two thousand dollars per acre. Selling all our Federal
lands might raise, being optimistic about central Alaska, perhaps a
trillion dollars, ignoring what happens to real estate prices if 40%
of our land area hits the market. A trillion dollars is barely a
tenth of the funded

National debt.

Repudiate the national Debt? Ask yourself: What happens next? Huge
numbers of Americans bought T-Bills for their retirement. Their
retirement savings are wiped out. Foreign governments hold dollar

reserves in Treasury bonds. The value of the dollar vanishes. Banks
hold financial reserves in Treasury bonds. Those banks are insolvent;
their doors close. The economy collapses. Furthermore, no one —

neither foreign governments nor our own citizens would be willing to
lend the U.S. money again since by this point we would have
established that we renege on our obligations.

My good friend Mike Badnarik always asks: ‘Is it Constitutional?’ No,
repudiation is not constitutional. The 14th Amendment says so. And the
opposition parties chant ‘Repudiation is Theft’.

#2: Libertarian National Defense

*Ruwart*: Free trade is the best national defense we could ever have.
No country bombs their trading partners. (page 77)

*Phillies*: A real defense requires real defenses. Trade is no
defense. Countries that trade with each other go to war regularly. A
few examples:

Consider the Latin American countries attacked and occupied,
sometimes repeatedly, by their major trade partner, the United
States. World War I was fought between countries that had traded
substantially with each other. In 1937, Japan invaded major trade
partner China. In 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, and 1945, when
Russia invaded Manjukuo, each country attacked a major trading
partner. In 1943, Italy declared war on Germany, which had been not
only its largest trade partner but its primary military ally.

National defense requires a real national defense policy, such as the
national defense policy that I have previously proposed at
http://choosegeorge.org/peace .