“The following are my positions on the burning issues of the day. I hold that the adoption of these libertarian positions would put America on the right road — toward liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.”
—JACOB HORNBERGER

Open the Borders

America’s decades-long immigration crisis has long been characterized by death, suffering, and the destruction of liberty. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. America’s system of immigration controls is a socialist system, one that is characterized by the central principle of socialism — central planning. As the libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, central planning produces “planned chaos,” a term that perfectly describes America’s decades-long, ongoing, never-ending deadly and destructive immigration crisis.

America’s system of immigration controls, which are fully supported by both Republicans and Democrats, has come with massive death and suffering for immigrants, in the form of suffocation in the backs of tractor-trailers, drowning in the Rio Grande, dying of thirst on lonely deserts in the American Southwest, or from bullets fired by Border Patrol agents.

This socialist system has also come with a brutal immigration police state in the American Southwest, which includes highway checkpoints, roving Border Patrol checkpoints, warrantless trespasses and searches of farms and ranches, violent raids on American businesses, forced deportations, a Berlin Wall that is based on the stealing of private land through eminent domain, immigration prisons, drone surveillance of private activity, and boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers. These are the types of things found in communist and other totalitarian regimes.

“Comprehensive immigration reform” is a ridiculous and nonsensical term. Every immigration “reform” ever enacted has only made the situation worse. There is one — and only one — moral and practical solution to America’s decades-long, ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis: restore America’s heritage of open borders — that is, the free movements of people back and forth across borders, just as we have domestically with state borders.

Abolish the Border Patrol and ICE and all controls on the free movements of people across borders. Leave people free to retain their citizenship. Genuine open borders is the only system that is consistent with the principles of liberty, morality, religion (“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”), free markets, and a limited-government republic.

Repeal Social Security

Contrary to popular opinion, especially among seniors, no one has ever put his money into a Social Security retirement account. No such account has ever existed. People have paid taxes, and those taxes were spent in the year of receipt, on such things as the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan or to send money to the crooked and corrupt regime in Ukraine.

From its very beginning in 1935, Social Security has been nothing more than a massive coercive socialist program, no different from food stamps and other welfare-state programs. The concept for Social Security originated among socialists in Germany and was then imported into the United States.

To fund Social Security, the IRS seizes money from young people through the force of taxation and gives it to seniors. There is no care or compassion involved in this process. If people refuse to pay their taxes, U.S. officials come after them with a vengeance, with liens, attachments, garnishments, investigative audits, criminal prosecution, fines, and imprisonment.

Our American ancestors lived without Social Security and other welfare-state programs for more than a century. That’s because our American ancestors were opposed to socialism. They understood that genuine charity comes from the willing heart of an individual, such as when children willingly honor their mother and father, not because of the coercive apparatus of taxation and welfare.

Socialism has proven to be the bane of mankind. Supported by both Republicans and Democrats, this socialist program has no legitimate place in a genuinely free society. It is an immoral and fraudulent Ponzi scheme that fleeces young people and destroys family values. It also produces a mindset of dependency on socialism among American seniors. Social Security needs to be repealed immediately, not reformed or phased out.

If Social Security were repealed, everyone would be fine. Many seniors are sufficiently wealthy and don’t need the money. Others will need to return to work. There is nothing wrong with that. There are lots of seniors in the workplace, which keeps them young and active. For the truly needy — e.g., cancer patients with few resources — there are children and grandchildren (who no longer would be paying FICA taxes), charitable foundations, church groups, neighborhood groups, and physicians and hospitals wiling to help out those in need. We just need to recapture our faith in freedom, ourselves, others, voluntary charity, and God.

Repeal Medicare

America once had the finest healthcare system in the world. Hardly anyone had major medical insurance because it wasn’t necessary. Prices were low and stable. Going to the doctor was like going to the grocery store. Physicians loved what they did in life. Many doctors even made house calls. Medical improvements were skyrocketing.

And then in 1965 came Medicare and Medicaid, two socialist programs that ended up destroying the finest healthcare system in history. Medicare and Medicaid, which are supported by both Republicans and Democrats, are the cause of America’s ongoing, never-ending healthcare crisis. That’s why healthcare prices began soaring through the roof. That’s when doctors started hating what they do and retiring early.

Socialism cannot be fixed or reformed. There is but one genuine solution to America’s healthcare crisis. That solution is not a full-fledged socialist healthcare system similar to the ones in Cuba and North Korea, which Democrats wish to impose on us. That would only make the healthcare crisis even worse than it already is. The only — repeat only — solution to America’s healthcare crisis lies in the repeal, not reform, of Medicare and Medicaid and the restoration of a genuine free-market healthcare system. That’s the only way we can restore the finest healthcare system in history to our land.

Restore Sound Money

A free and prosperous society necessarily depends on sound money. Unfortunately, however, both Republicans and Democrats have destroyed what was once the finest monetary system in history.

The Constitution, by its express terms, established a monetary system based on gold coins and silver coins. It was not a monetary system of “paper money backed by gold,” as Republicans and Democrats claim. Our American ancestors rejected paper money, fully and completely. All government debt instruments were promises to pay money — that is, gold coins and silver coins.

Gold and silver were our official money for more than 125 years. Our American ancestors wanted it that way. They knew that with paper money, government officials would plunder and loot the populace through monetary debasement and devaluation — that is, through inflation.

In 1933, in one of the most shocking and morally repugnant acts in U.S. history, President Franklin Roosevelt declared an end to America’s constitutional system of gold coins and silver coins and the start of a paper-money monetary system. With a dictatorial decree that would have made fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proud, FDR commanded all Americans to deliver their gold coins to the federal government in return for irredeemable paper notes and then proceeded to devalue his paper money after Americans complied with his order. FDR also ordered that any American who got caught holding what had been the country’s official money for more than a century would face a felony conviction, a 10-year jail sentence, a $10,000 fine, and forfeiture of his gold coins.

The Federal Reserve, which had established in 1913, was now empowered to plunder and loot the American people through the printing of vast amounts of paper money to pay for the ever-increasing expenditures of the welfare-warfare state. That’s why the purchasing power of the dollar has plummeted, decade after decade.

A free and prosperous society necessarily depends on the restoration of sound money. That necessarily entails abolishing the Federal Reserve System. The second-best solution to America’s monetary woes is to restore America’s constitutional system of gold coins and silver coins. The best solution is adopt the libertarian Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek’s concept of a free-market monetary system.

RESTORE THE REPUBLIC

Our nation was founded as a limited-government republic. That’s the type of government that the Constitution called into existence. Its powers were weak and few, limited to those enumerated in the Constitution. Its powers were even further restricted by the Bill of Rights. That’s the way our ancestors wanted it. They didn’t trust the federal government.

Our limited-government republic entailed a relatively small, basic military force and no Pentagon, military-industrial complex, CIA, or NSA. Our American ancestors were fiercely opposed to standing armies because they knew that standing armies, not foreign regimes, were the greatest threat to their freedom and well-being.

The worst mistake our nation has ever made was to convert the federal government into a national-security state after World War II. A national-security state a totalitarian form of governmental structure. North Korea is a national-security state. So are Cuba, Egypt, China, and Russia. And post-World War II United States.

By converting the federal government to a national-security state, Republicans and Democrats destroyed our rights and liberties by vesting the federal government with omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers. These include the powers of assassination, torture, mass secret surveillance, and indefinite detention, both for foreigners and Americans.

Democrats and Republicans did not seek or secure a constitutional amendment that authorized the abandonment of a limited-government republic and the conversion to a national-security state. That means that the national-security state is illegitimate under our form of constitutional government.

Democrats and Republican say that the national-security state keeps us safe. It’s actually the exact opposite. Through its foreign policy of interventionism, invasions, wars of aggression, occupations, foreign aid, alliances with dictatorial regimes, crises, and coups, the national-security state makes us less safe, especially through terrorist blowback and retaliation. As our American ancestors clearly understood, a national-security state is the biggest threat to our freedom and well-being.

The restoration of our rights and liberties necessarily depends on the dismantling of the national-security state form of government and the restoration of our founding governmental system of a limited government republic and a small, basic military force.

No Nuclear War

Using NATO to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact, the U.S. national-security establishment has, once again, brought us perilously close to nuclear war with Russia, just as it did back in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

NATO is a Cold War dinosaur that should have been dismantled at the end of the Cold War. Instead, the Pentagon has used NATO to reignite its Cold War against Russia, to ensure ever-increasing budgets for the national-security establishment and its army of voracious “defense” contractors who feed at the public trough.

We need to adhere to President Washington’s and President Jefferson’s admonitions to avoid entangling alliances. We need to embrace President Kennedy’s policy of bringing an end to the obsessive anti-Russia hostility that the Pentagon and the CIA have inculcated in the American people since the end of World War II.

We need to immediately withdraw from NATO and terminate all foreign aid to Ukraine (and every other regime). Our lives, liberty, and well-being depend on it.

END ALL SANCTIONS AND EMBARGOES

Sanctions and embargoes are part of the federal killing machine that Republicans and Democrats have initiated against people in foreign countries. Their objective is to kill or economically impoverish as many innocent people as possible in order to achieve a political goal, such as regime change. The idea is that if enough innocent people can be made to die or impoverished, they will rise up in a violent revolution and replace their ruler with a pro-U.S. ruler.

One of the best examples of this evil and morally repugnant foreign policy was the system of economic sanctions that U.S. officials enforced against the Iraqi people in the 1990s. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright expressed the sentiment of U.S. officials when she declared that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children — yes, children! — were “worth it.” By “it,” she meant the ouster of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who had been a loyal partner and ally of U.S. officials in the 1980, and his replacement with another loyal pro-U.S. dictator.

The sixty-year-old economic embargo against the Cuban people is another good example of this evil and immoral Republican-Democratic policy. A Cold War dinosaur, its aim is to inflict as much death and suffering as possible on the Cuban populace in the never-ending hope that they will rise up and oust Cuba’s communist regime and replace it with another pro-U.S. dictatorship.

Sanctions and embargoes are the utmost in moral depravity because, like terrorism, they target innocent people with the aim of achieving a political objective.

Sanctions and embargoes also constitute a grave attack on the natural, God-given rights of liberty of contract, private property, freedom of travel, freedom of trade, and freedom of association of the American people. Just ask the many Americans who have been indicted, prosecuted, fined, and incarcerated by their own government for violating its sacred sanctions and embargoes.

REPEAL DRUG LAWS

It would be difficult to find a better example of the destruction of liberty that both Republicans and Democrats have foisted upon our land than their deadly and destructive war on drugs. It has brought massive violence, death, corruption, and destruction of liberty and privacy to our nation and also foreign nations. It is also one of the most racist government programs in our lifetime, perhaps even more so than segregation, given the disproportionate impact it has had on Blacks.

Adults have the fundamental, natural, God-given right to possess, ingest, and distribute whatever they want, no matter how harmful or dangerous it might be. That includes alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, opioids, fentanyl, sugar, fatty foods ,and everything else. It simply is no business of the government to control, monitor, or interfere with what a person puts into his mouth. Government is not our daddy.

The drug war is nothing more than a repeat of Prohibition, which also brought nothing but death, destruction of liberty and privacy, and the rise of black-market gangs and cartels.

Drug use and drug addiction belong in the private sector with therapy and rehabilitation. That’s where compassion resides, not in the coercive apparatus of the DEA and the criminal-justice system.

The only ones who benefit from the drug war are the drug lords and the enormous drug-war criminal-justice bureaucracy whose salaries and bribes depend on this gigantic immoral and destructive federal program.

Republicans and Democrats have done enough damage with their deadly, destructive, and racist drug war. Legalize all drugs. Our freedom, privacy, and well-being require it.

Preserve Gun Rights

People have the natural, God-given right to keep and bear arms. They have a right of self-defense from violent criminals, such as murderers and rapists. They also have the right to resist the tyranny of their own government, should that need ever arises. A gun-free society inevitably becomes a submissive, compliant, obedient, and subservient society.

What about gun violence in America? No, it’s not because of widespread gun ownership. After all, the Swiss people are armed to the teeth and yet are not besieged by periodic bouts of irrational mass violence.

America’s gun violence is rooted in (1) the drug war and (2) in the federal government’s killing machine abroad, which shows no regard for the value of human life when it comes to foreigners. For whatever reason, that killing machine is triggering something within off-kilter people here at home that is motivating them to copy that same killing pattern.

Legalize drugs and dismantle the federal killing machine abroad and you bring an end to irrational mass killings here at home.

Unilaterally Adopt Free Trade

Whenever two sides enter into an economic exchange, they both benefit. Otherwise, they wouldn’t enter into the trade. Therefore, people’s standard of living can rise simply through the act of exchange. The corollary to this principle is: When government officials interfere with freedom of trade with rules, regulations, and controls, they reduce people’s standard of living.

Unfortunately, however, both Republicans and Democrats have initiated vicious trade wars against foreign nations and economic protectionism here at home, which reduce people’s standard of living, both here and abroad. Equally important, such measures constitute a grave attack on the economic liberty of the American people.

Everyone has the natural, God-given right to enter into any economic exchange with anyone anywhere in the world. No government, including the U.S. government, wields the legitimate authority to infringe on the natural, God-given rights of freedom of trade, liberty of contract, and economic liberty.

No trade negotiations or trade treaties are necessary. American should lead the world in the unilateral adoption of free trade.

Abolish Income Taxation and the IRS

People have a fundamental, God-given right to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with it. Their earnings belong to them, not to the government, not to others, and not to society.

The right to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth necessarily leads to higher standards of living for everyone. That’s because when wealth is accumulated in the form of savings, it is invested in capital, which makes people more productive. More productivity means higher wages and higher standards of living.

A progressive income tax is one of the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto. Given that our American ancestors opposed socialism, it’s no surprise that the United States had no income tax or IRS for more than a century. The result was the most prosperous and charitable nation in history.

Abolish the CIA

With its secret hiring of Nazis, its infamous MKULTRA program involving drug experimentation on unsuspecting people, its intentional destruction of its MKULTRA records, its program of state-sponsored assassinations of foreign and domestic leaders (including Congo president Patrice Lumumba, Chilean Gen. Rene Schneider, Cuban president Fidel Castro, and U.S. president John Kennedy), its drone assassinations, its system of torture, its intentional destruction of its torture videos, its coups, its program of indefinite detention, its secret prison and torture camps, and its continued secrecy in the JFK assassination, the CIA is, without any doubt whatsoever, the most evil and malevolent agency in the history of our country.

Given its omnipotent, dark-side powers, there is no way that the American people can ever be free with this evil and malevolent agency as part of our governmental structure. To restore liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony to our land, the CIA needs to be permanently eradicated.

Abolish the FBI

President Truman was right to call the FBI America’s Gestapo agency. The FBI’s longtime director J. Edgar Hoover used the agency as a political weapon by which he compiled secret files on people so that he could blackmail them into complying with his will. It is revealing that the FBI has honored this serial blackmailer by naming its enormous Washington, D.C., building after him. Recent history has shown the FBI is used as a political weapon to target anyone in the political arena who opposes its Gestapo-like tactics.

Our American ancestors lived without a national police force for more than a hundred years. They were right. Eradicate this Gestapo-like agency. Leave criminal justice at the state level.

Abolish the NSA

The National Security Agency is a tyrannical agency that is part of the national-security establishment. Its job is to engage in secret surveillance of the American people, read our emails, monitor our Internet activity, and listen to our private communications. It has no place in a genuinely free society. It is not a coincidence that every communist and totalitarian regime has an NSA as part of its governmental structure.

End Foreign Interventionsism

America’s founding foreign policy was one of non-intervention. This non-interventionist foreign policy was captured by the famous Fourth of July speech to Congress by John Quincy Adams, entitled “In Search of Monsters to Destroy.”

The abandonment of our founding foreign policy in favor of foreign interventionism has been an absolute disaster for America and the world. Invasions, wars of aggression, occupations, forever wars, coups, foreign aid, sanctions, embargoes, alliances with dictatorial regimes, and now, once again, getting us perilously close to life-destroying nuclear war.

With their joint, bipartisan support of foreign interventionism, Republicans and Democrats have unleashed the Pentagon and the CIA to wreak death and destruction around the world, while, at the same time, isolating our nation with sanctions, embargoes, trade wars, travel restrictions, and trade restrictions.
We need to do the opposite. We need to rein in and dismantle the Pentagon and the CIA and unleash the American private sector to interact with the people of the world.

We also need to reject the national-security establishment’s obsessive mindset of extreme hostility toward Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Nicaragua, and other nations and instead restore and maintain peaceful and harmonious relations with the people of the world.

The restoration of non-interventionism necessarily includes the closure and abandonment of all U.S. military bases in foreign countries, starting with the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s torture and prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That property rightly belongs to Cuba, not the United States.

The time has come to restore our nation’s founding foreign policy of non-interventionism. Our lives, freedom, and well-being depend on it.

End the War on Terrorism

Contrary to what Republicans and Democrats maintain, the terrorists don’t hate America for its freedom and values. They hate the killing machine that the federal government has unleashed in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

By bringing an end to the federal government’s deadly and destructive policy of foreign interventionism, the threat of terrorism would dissipate. That means that the war on terrorism, along with all of its liberty-destroying aspects (e.g., the USA PATRIOT Act, mass secret surveillance, torture, indefinite detention, FISA Court kangaroo proceedings, and drone assassinations) can be brought to an end.

Separate School and State

It would be difficult to find a better example of a socialist system than public (i.e., government) schooling. The system is run like the army — in a top, down, command-and-control manner. Attendance is mandatory under the state’s compulsory-attendance laws. Funding is through force of taxation. The state decides the curriculum and the textbooks. Teachers are state employees.
 
Is it any wonder that America’s public school systems have been in perpetual crisis and chaos for decades? That’s what socialism always brings — crises and chaos.
 
The government has no more role in education than it does in religion and healthcare. Public (i.e., government) schooling has been a disaster. With its army-lite structure, mandatory attendance laws, and funding through taxation, public schooling destroys a child’s natural love of learning and molds students into becoming deferential, compliant, obedient, and submissive adults.
 
The children who pay the biggest price for government schooling are those in the inner city, where public schools are oftentimes cesspools of violence and drugs rather than the peaceful and healthy centers of learning they should be.
 
None of this is the fault of teachers or administrators, many of which are highly dedicated people. When you combine an inherently bad system with good people, the system will win out every time.
 
Republicans say that “school vouchers” are the answer to the public-schooling morass. They are wrong. School vouchers are nothing more than another socialist device (using taxation to take money from some people to give it to others) to make public schooling work more efficiently through “choice” and “competition.” In actuality, what school vouchers do is more deeply embed the state in the educational process by making private schools dependent on the state’s voucher dole and subject to greater state control and regulation.
 
The free market produces the best of everything. It would produce the best education possible for all children. The ideal would a constitutional amendment patterned after the First and Fourteenth Amendments: “Neither the federal government nor the states shall make any law establishing or supporting education or abridging the free exercise thereof.”

Separate Healthcare and the State

Government has no more business involving itself in healthcare than it does in religion and education. The imposition of mask requirements, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns by the federal government and the state governments is the hallmark of tyrannical regimes.

But it’s not enough to simply terminate those infringements on liberty. To achieve genuine liberty, it is necessary to abolish the Centers for Disease Control and all other federal and state agencies that involve themselves in healthcare.

Leave healthcare to the free market. The free market produces the best of everything. Leave businesses free to establish their own mask and vaccine requirements. Leave consumers free to make their own healthcare decisions.

The ideal is a constitutional amendment patterned after the First and Fourteenth Amendments: “No law shall be enacted by ether the federal or state governments respecting the establishment or support of healthcare or abridging the free exercise thereof.”

Abortion

As a Catholic, I believe that life begins at conception. It is important, however, to point out the rank hypocrisy of both Republicans and Democrats on the abortion issue.

Republicans claim to be “pro-life” but, unfortunately, that claim has never manifested itself when it comes to the lives of foreigners. The Pentagon’s and CIA’s foreign wars have killed millions of foreigners, with not a whit of concern by Republicans (or Democrats). Moreover, U.S. sanctions and embargoes intentionally target innocent foreigners with death and suffering as a way to achieve regime change, just like terrorists do. The killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through U.S. sanctions, with the full support of Republicans (and Democrats) comes to mind.

Democrats claim to be “pro-choice” but have long denied people freedom of choice when it comes to the right to ingest, possess, and distribute drugs that haven’t been approved by the government. I’m referring of the course to the decades-long, deadly, destructive, and racially bigoted war on drugs that Democrats (and Republicans) have long supported and kept in existence.

Issue Pardons

All criminal charges against Julian Assange and Edward Snowden should be immediately dismissed. Their only “crime” was to disclose the truth about the evil and immoral conduct of the U.S. national-security state, including the war crimes it committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Assange and Snowden should be hailed as heroes for their courage and patriotism. If the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA nonetheless persist in prosecuting Assange and Snowden, they should be immediately pardoned.

All non-violent drug-war offenders should also be immediately pardoned. It is actually Republicans and Democrats who should be apologizing and seeking our pardon for what they have done to destroy so many people, especially Blacks, with their beloved deadly, destructive, and racist war on drugs.

Everyone who has been convicted of any non-violent offense should also be pardoned, including 37-year-old Ross Ulbricht, whose double-life sentence plus 40 years without possibility of parole is repugnant to the extreme and shocking to any well-formed conscience.

Protect the Environment

The solution to environmental problems lies with a private-property order and the free market. Socialism and regulation will only make matters worse and destroy economic liberty in the process.

The EPA is one of the most abusive and tyrannical agencies within the federal government. In the name of protecting the environment, it has tyrannized and destroyed countless landowners.

Moreover, consider the Interstate Highway System, one of the biggest socialist projects in U.S. history. Using the power of eminent domain, it destroyed countless families and neighborhoods all across America. It also provided a free subsidy to the automobile industry, which ended up producing millions of cars that are now one of the major causes of air pollution. Without the Interstate Highway System, America’s transportation system would have developed in a more balanced, non-polluting way.

The federal government is good at killing and destroying. It should not be entrusted with caring for the environment.

End Economic Regulations

People have the natural, God-given right to enter into any economic transactions with others. That’s the way people improve their economic well-being. All that regulation does is interfere with that process, thereby decreasing people’s economic prosperity.

The government has no more business interfering with economic activity than it does interfering with religious, educational, and healthcare activity. A genuine free-enterprise is one in which economic enterprise is free of government control, regulation, and interference.

We need to restore America’s heritage of free enterprise and free markets that both Republicans and Democrats have destroyed. The ideal would be a constitutional amendment patterned after the First and the Fourteenth Amendments: “No law shall be enacted by either the federal or state governments respecting the regulation of commerce or abridging the free exercise thereof.

LGBTQ

Republicans and Democrats have an obsessive need to control and interfere with the lives of others. That’s, of course, what their drug laws are all about. Republicans and Democrats have an obsessive need to control what adults put into their mouths.
 
Republicans have a special obsessive need to condemn people for the private choices they make with respect to sexual orientation. Republicans also have a special obsessive need to monitor and control what people do within the privacy of their own homes and, especially, in their bedrooms. They want the state to punish people when their private behavior doesn’t meet with Republican approval.
 
Democrats have a special obsessive need to control what people do with their own money and their own privately owned property. That’s why they want the state to punish vendors who choose not to sell their products to people because of their sexual orientation. Private business owners have the right to sell their products to whomever they choose. It’s their privately owned business, not the state’s.
 
With their system of educational socialism, Republicans and Democrats politicize their obsessions in the public-school classroom. There is a simple solution to this politicized socialist morass: end state involvement in education and leave families free to choose the best educational vehicles for their children in a free market.
 
Life can be difficult at times. We don’t need Republicans or Democrats making it more difficult with their obsessive need to have the state control and interfere with the peaceful choices that people make in their lives. Let’s leave people free to make their own way through life, each in their own way.