<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><i>Punching Bag </i>author Joe Gilbertson led the final segment of our interview with Libertarian presidential nominee Dr. Jo Jorgensen, asking her to comment on the CIA.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">“There are things being done now that we wouldn’t even have dreamed of [when I was in the CIA]. It is horrible,” says Gilbertson, who spent 12 years with the agency. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">A prime example is the <i>Patriot Act</i>, which made it much easier for intelligence agencies to spy on Americans. </span><span class="s1">Like the COVID-19 restrictions, the <em>Patriot Act</em> was implemented for good reason but was in fact a major violation of personal freedom. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">“With the coronavirus, I mean, this is the largest assault on our liberty that I’ve seen in my lifetime. It’s just amazing that the government basically put us all under house arrest,” says Jorgensen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Moving back to intelligence, Jorgensen says she would abolish the CIA and replace it with a spying agency located inside the military. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><strong><span class="s1">Gilbertson’s next topic was energy, which he points out has been monopolized by the Left. </span></strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">“What do you think of the Green New Deal and the $93 trillion potential cost for it and those things that are coming out of the Left right now?” asked Gilbertson.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">“Well the Green New Deal &#8211; once again &#8211; is just an excuse to make the government bigger and to spend more money,” says Jorgensen. And that’s the opposite of what Libertarians want. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">&#8220;If you look at where pollution is, if you got out a globe of the world, you would see that wherever there was big government there was also big pollution, if you look at places where there’s more freedom, you see that there’s less pollution.” </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Several environmental problems could be solved with a free market approach, continues Jorgensen. Consider animal poaching, which typically occurs on government land.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">“If those animals were on private property, then people wouldn’t be poaching,” says Jorgensen. “If you think about a farmer here in the United States, would he ever go out, get out his shotgun, shoot all of his cows, and say, ‘Wow I really got a good haul today.&#8221; No, he owns the farm, he owns the cows, it’s in his best interest to keep breeding them and keep them from going extinct.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>A similar principle applies to energy, notes Gilbertson.</b></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">“If you have an energy market, if you construct it like the Internet, where anybody can connect, anybody can buy and sell power…then you could actually make a whole lot of money, first of all,” explains Gilbertson. </span><span class="s1">“The socialist types are always talking about redistributing wealth; well, this redistributes that wealth but in a pretty enterprising way so that people are earning their way, they aren’t getting subsidies.”</span></p>
<p>This system could be used to alleviate poverty in a lot of places, adds Gilbertson.<span class="s1"> “You set up a little energy market and let people contribute to it.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Gilbertson expands these ideas in his book <em>The Energy Net,</em> which outlines his proposal to solve climate change (and a whole lot more) just by having an energy plan that’s profitable rather than one that requires subsidies.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Jorgensen agrees, reminding us of a core Libertarian belief: &#8220;A</span><span class="s1">nything that’s voluntary &#8211; with individuals working together on their own &#8211; always has a better solution than the government.” </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">—</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">You can learn more about presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen and the Libertarian Party at her website JOJ2020.com. </span></p>