An interview with Jo Jorgensen; Libertarian candidate for president

Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen, Ph.D, visited Bozeman on Friday, Sept. 18 at the Bozeman Pond. The campaign rally featured local and national Libertarian Party representatives. Speakers included Ken Moellman, Vice-chair of the national Libertarian Party, Francis Wendt, a candidate for Montana HD-62 and Roger Roots, a candidate running for Montana’s state auditor who introduced Jorgensen at the rally. The Exponent had the exclusive opportunity to interview Jorgensen after she finished speaking to the crowd.

Jorgensen is a professor of psychology at Clemson University in South Carolina. She holds a doctorate in industrial-organizational psychology from Clemson, allowing her to teach the large introductory psychology classes she loves. Jorgensen is also the first woman to appear on the ballot in all 50 states twice in a lifetime, as she also appeared as the Vice Presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party in 1996 with Harry Browne, a fact that she is very proud of and which appears in her stump speech.

Third-party candidates, like those from the Libertarian Party, don’t usually make national headlines like their counterparts on the Democratic and Republican tickets. However, according to current polls, millions of people will cast their ballots in support of the Libertarian Party this November.

The Libertarian Party is the third-largest party in the U.S., yet not everyone knows what identifying as a Libertarian actually means. “Libertarian is on your side and not the side of special interest bureaucrats and lobbyists in Washington. I would say a Libertarian would tell you that you know best what is best for you, not the federal government,” Jorgensen said. Libertarians oppose government bureaucracy and advocate for less red tape, as they see large government as a hindrance on the private sector and a stunt for economic growth.

These principles are what inspired Jorgensen to mount a run for president. She sees the two-party system in Washington as being broken. Although she has no elected experience, she sees her administration making the government work for the people. “Government is too big, too bossy, too nosey, too intrusive and the thing is, they often hurt the people they are trying to help,” said Jorgensen.

One focus of her campaign is lowering the cost of college and eliminating debt post-college. Her plan to help eliminate college debt includes defunding and eliminating the Department of Education and, in turn, getting rid of the Free Application for Student Aid (FAFSA), for which millions of college students apply starting in October. In place of these government-funded loans would be private loans that students would have to seek out individually. She would utilize the competition of the free market to help drive the price of college down, forcing universities to compete for students rather than rely on the “free money” that currently saturates the market.

The student debt crisis has been heightened by the current economic recession. Recent Democratic proposals by senators Elizabeth Warren D-MA and Chuck Schumer D-NY to forgive student loans, as well as the push by the left to make college tuition-free, are not policies that Jorgensen is in favor of. She expressed that the government should not be picking winners and losers or assigning favorites. In the proposed resolution, she claims that Democrats are overstepping their bounds and creating a government that is too big. “It’s the government playing favorites and in the free market, you don’t see those favors. In the free market, you have to work to get your business and people to treat you right,” said Jorgensen.

Rather, Jorgensen would like to see the federal government allow students to declare bankruptcy over their outstanding loans. “If you can file for bankruptcy for your car debt, or your health care debt, you should be able to file for bankruptcy for your student loan debt, especially since they’re the ones who caused it,” said Jorgensen in response to a question about students paying back their loans.

A statement on Jorgensen’s website on the COVID-19 pandemic reads, “Washington bureaucrats and politicians have shown gross negligence and ineptitude, thereby lengthened the pandemic.” When asked how she would have handled the pandemic from the outset if she were President she said, “I would have gotten rid of the FDA requirements. Until 1962, you only had to prove that a drug was safe and that was it, and things worked pretty well actually. After 1962, you had to prove efficacy, that the drug did what it was supposed to do. Now that sounds like a nice goal, but that requires a lot of testing, So, I would have gotten rid of the efficacy requirement and opened up the markets and also the CDC.”

Jorgensen also stated that the CDC is blocking COVID-19 testing kits. She believes that from the start, the floodgates should have been opened for testing kits to fill the market so that “we [could] know who needed to stay home and who could go to work. We lost tens of millions of jobs because everybody was staying home even though they didn’t have to,” claimed Jorgensen.

The Libertarian Presidential candidate expressed strong disdain for the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, stating that, “The CARES Act gives all the money to the big companies. Let people keep their money and decide personally [how to spend it] rather than taking my tax dollars and giving it to the big companies and the airlines.” She later added, “With all the shutdowns, a lot of small businesses were required to shut down meanwhile the big box stores and the big chains were allowed to stay open. Once again, that’s government playing favorites as to who should stay open and who shouldn’t. That’s how you support small businesses, don’t shut them down.”

When asked about a nationwide mask mandate in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Jorgensen said, “There shouldn’t be one. First of all, it’s really frustrating because we’re getting into the way of thinking that if the government doesn’t do it, it doesn’t get done. Walmart proved that wrong. In Walmart, it doesn’t matter what state you’re in, it doesn’t matter what the local laws are, if you’re going to shop at Walmart then you’re going to have to wear a mask. So why not have it be that way? If you want to wear a mask, if you’re vulnerable, or if you just want to for whatever reason, and if you want other people to wear a mask, [then] shop at Walmart. If you don’t want to wear a mask then shop at another store. We want people to be able to vote with their feet or vote with their dollars.”

The value of voting with your money bleeds into a lot of Jorgensen’s other suggested policies. In answering a question about Libertarian philosophy she pondered, “Why do we all have to send all of our money to the government [where] they come up with one solution and then half of us aren’t happy? How about we each get to decide? That’s what the Libertarian Party is basically about, that you get to retain your decision making power, [that] you get to retain your money and that you get to make the decisions.”

If elected, Jorgensen will have to work to pass policies with primarily Democrats and Republicans sitting in Congress. She plans to “not use executive orders except to restore the constitution. So I wouldn’t do it just willy-nilly and lastly, I would basically not accept any budget or not sign any law that I didn’t agree with. So I would send back budgets until they [Congress] did it right… yes, they could override me, but they’d have to work for it. And, last, I’d remind them that I was elected president and if they want to make their constituents happy, they need to follow my lead if they want a nice cushy job and they want to be reelected.”

At the end of the rally, an audience member asked in the wake of the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would Jorgensen nominate as a replacement. She named U.S. Constitutional lawyer and professor at Harvard Law, Alan Dershowitz, as well as Fox News analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, who served as a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995.

Before the time of publication, the Exponent had requested interviews with both the Biden and Trump campaigns. The Exponent is a nonpartisan news outlet and is willing to cover any party’s political candidates for the upcoming election.