Gary Johnson, the two-term governor of New
Mexico, one-time Libertarian presidential candidate, and founder of
the Our America Initiative libertarian advocacy organization, took
to Reddit last night for a session of
Ask Me Anything (AMA).
AMA is a sort of crowd-sourced interview in which the best
inquiries get voted to the top. Johnson received mostly softball
questions and didn’t delve too deeply with any of his responses.
Still, he did have some interesting things to say.
Perhaps his liveliest moment was taking a jab at Sen. Rand
Paul’s (R-Ky.) libertarian street cred.
Asked if he thinks Paul’s run for president in 2016 will
overshadow a (L/l)ibertarian candidate, Johnson responded, “I hope
not. My fear is that people associate Rand Paul’s social
conservatism with libertarianism, when it’s not.” Disappointingly,
though, Johnson didn’t go into any more detail about his thoughts
on Paul and what he perceives as non-libertarian about him. Not
about Paul, but the GOP in general, he wrote that he thinks
“Republicans, especially the Christian-Right, are hurting or
helping Libertarians politically.” This is an interesting
perspective, since in a Google Hangout last year Johnson said he’d
consider running either for governor or president as a Republican
again.
The former governor, who has previously confirmed that he
intends to run for president again, gave a two-word answer about
his “primary focus” for the 2016 election: “Economic policy.”
He expressed optimism about the chances of a libertarian
president being elected in his lifetime. How will that come about,
though?
By getting more exposure. Johnson is currently suing the
Commission on Presidential Debates for excluding him in the 2012
debates. He explained, “I agree that the two party system stomps on
any kind of competition. A great first step is to open the
presidential debates to all qualified candidates, including the
Libertarians. If that happens, the Libertarian party will
experience unprecedented growth.”
One hot topic on the AMA was prison policy and privatization.
The highest voted question in the entire interview, “Could you
explain your support for privatization of our prison system? Aren’t
you concerned that this could create perverse profit incentives to
lobby for locking more people up, and ultimately cost America far
more money?” went unanswered. Johnson did answer an easier one: “Do
you think the private prison lobby (CCA) has a major influence over
our politicians decisions to want the privatization of
prisons?”
He said, “No, I think that may be an inaccurate statement, but
clearly the public prison lobby is even bigger. It’s probably
accurate to a degree, but unquestionably the public prison lobby is
bigger.”
He also concisely voiced opinions on other issues:
I’m becoming more and more sold on the notion of Bitcoin.
…I reject the insurance model. I think we should have a free
market approach to healthcare. If that existed, there would be much
lower prices, and we would only have insurance to cover ourselves
for catastrophic injury and illness. …The Second Amendment is pretty clear. I don’t think suppressers
or magazines should be legislated.
Johnson has done about
a dozen AMAs, so he probably doesn’t feel the need to repeat
himself at length. Though, that raises the question of why he
continues to do them, if he’s not going try to sway people toward
libertarianism with anything more than talking points.
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