Tonight, I had the privilege of talking to Eric Brakey about recent developments in the Republican liberty movement, Trump’s trade policy, and Gary Johnson’s third party bid for the US Senate.

TLR: I’m talking to Eric Brakey, the Republican candidate for US Senate from Maine. Eric, thanks for speaking with me.

The 2018 primaries don’t seem to have gone well for liberty Republicans. In fact, after the loss of candidates like Freitas and Petersen, I personally feel that you’re the only Republican running for US Senate left worthy of getting excited about, and most analysts seem to think King’s likely to be reelected. The non-liberty portions of Trump seem to be the most popular, and on the left, we’re seeing a resurgence of openly socialist candidates, energized by Bernie in a way that people like you were energized by Ron Paul. Why do you think that is, and are there still reasons to be optimistic about the liberty movement?

EB: Well, I think there are many reasons to be very optimistic about the liberty movement. I just came from, just a few weeks ago, I was at the national convention for Young Americans for Liberty. And what I saw there was so many young people, six years after Ron Paul last ran for President, so many young people who are still coming to the message of liberty for the first time.

You know, I met a young guy who was a chapter president for Young Americans for Liberty out in California. I asked how he came to the liberty movement, how he found us. And he said, you know… two years ago he had been the San Francisco director for Bernie Sanders. And when Bernie Sanders lost, then he found Gary Johnson. And Gary Johnson lead him to understanding libertarianism and then reading Austrian economics, then discovering Rand Paul and Ron Paul’s message…

People are still coming to this message, because the message of liberty is always fresh in this system we live in that is run by authoritarians. So, I am very encouraged. We are in the fourth wave of the liberty movement. There are still so many young people coming to this.

And you know what? Look at Nick Freitas in Virginia. People say ‘well, Nick Freitas lost the primary’. But Nick Freitas came so close to winning that primary. He came out of nowhere, and took on a Republican who had been the statewide nominee in the past, who was incredibly well known, and he nearly won. That is a success story. Certainly, he fell short of winning the primary, but he so exceeded expectations, the liberty movement exceeded expectations in that race, and I’m sure that Nick Freitas and so many others, there’s so much more to come.

And in this race for the US Senate in Maine, when analysts say that Angus King is the favored to win, well of course they say that about any person who is kind of a long-standing institution. But when I ran for state Senate for the first time as a liberty activist at the age of twenty-six, I ran against a thirty-six year Democrat incumbent who had never lost a race, people told me that I had no chance and there was no point in running. But I ran, I knocked on eight thousand doors, I talked about the message of liberty, getting government out of our lives, protecting our freedoms, protecting our tax dollars, and in that race they said couldn’t be won, I won in a twenty point landslide.

And we’re doing the exact same thing here in Maine. The message of liberty inspires people. It inspires people to go, and do things, to get involved, to get active… in ways that other politicians who don’t have that message on their side can only pay people to do. We’re seeing a grassroots uprising here in Maine, just as we are seeing pockets of across the country. And we’re taking that fight to the US Senate this November, we’re taking it against Angus King, who in every poll we have done, is consistently comes under fifty percent, he is incredibly vulnerable… we’re taking that fight and we’re going to win this November.

TLR: Well, I don’t think you’ll ever have to tell people to please clap.

Recently, President Trump publicly commented on specific fed decisions revolving around interest rates, breaking with the tradition of Presidents refraining from taking a public position on monetary policy that could be seen as attempts to influence fed policy. Was he wrong to do so?

EB: I kind of think the question is… was he wrong to comment on fed policy? I think we should have politicians commenting on fed policy all the time. I think we should always be questioning fed policy. I think where I disagree with President Trump on this is not that he questioned fed policy, it’s that he’s not questioning the very existence of the federal reserve in the first place. He’s questioning where interest rates should be set, not why do we have a central bank setting interest rates in the first place. A central bank is a core plank of the communist manifesto. This should not be part of an American free market society. We should allow for, as Ron Paul called for, competition in currencies. We should allow for freely floating interest rates. We should explore ways to have a sound dollar. And none of those involve having a central bank.

TLR: Speaking of Ron Paul, you’ve favored Ron Paul’s Social Security Preservation Act which aims to prevent Congress from “raiding” the social security trust fund by investing it in interest-bearing accounts outside of treasury securities. Angus King claims no major changes are necessary to preserve social security. Why is he wrong?

EB: Well, he’s wrong because, the news just came out about a month ago, that social security is on the path to insolvency, by, uh… I believe the date is 2036. So if he’s saying that there’s no changes needed, there’s nothing we need to do, that everything is hunky dory, then he’s got his head in the sand. We have people who have planned their lives around social security being there, and the government made that promise when they forcibly took this money out of people’s paychecks and said we’re saving this for your future.

But the truth is, of course, they didn’t. They took that money, and they spent it. They spent it on other things. And they didn’t save it for us. They put in IOUs, and now there are huge unfunded liabilities in the social security program. And this is because we entrusted it to Congress. We entrusted it to the politicians.

We should never have done that. So, to fix social security going forward, one of the things we should do, is we should take it out of the hands of Congress. They should not have the opportunity going forward any more to reach into social security funds to fund other things that they want to pay for and slip IOUs in their place.

Ideally, we should all have individualized accounts within social security. Money that is in an account, for you. If that money is going to be forcibly taken from your paycheck, then it should at least go into an account that you can look at, you can see that money is there. And maybe even, you get some choice in terms of how that money is invested. Maybe you even want to invest in bonds or stocks or other things, like you can do with other money you have set aside for retirement. That would truly be putting people back in charge of social security.

TLR: You’ve said you support an “American First” foreign policy, because America shouldn’t be world policeman and shouldn’t give money to foreign governments that work against our interests and values. You claim that our military is overextended, and that it shouldn’t be used in conflict without a declaration of war passed by Congress. Has President Trump actually pursued an “American First” foreign policy, defined in such a way?

EB: I believe he has, though he hasn’t been perfect about it, of course. But I think, certainly, when we look at how he’s handled situations like North Korea. I would say that’s been a good example of an “American First” foreign policy. Where he’s used tough diplomacy rather than diplomatic isolationism and threatening… well, obviously he did actually threaten to bomb people but didn’t actually drop any bombs. Here’s the interesting thing I think with President Trump, is… we look at… let’s compare President Trump to President Obama…

TLR: Seven countries difference?

EB: Yeah. I mean, how many new countries has Donald Trump taken us to war in? Mostly, he’s continued wars that have already been in place under Barack Obama. And while I wish we would end these wars a lot quicker, while I wish that we would bring the troops home from places like Afghanistan where we’ve been for seventeen years now, I can at least commend the President that he hasn’t really started really any new wars. And hopefully, even if it’s not on the timetable, I hope we will be eventually bringing our troops home.

But when you look at North Korea, he didn’t drop a single bomb. He dropped Twitter bombs. He used harsh words. And as I watched him dropping Twitter bombs, calling Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man”, talking about how big his big red button was, how they could wipe North Korea off the face of the planet, I watched this with some, actually, with some horror. Thinking, “Oh my God, what is our President doing, we’re marching toward war.” But as I thought we were marching toward war, that was my fear, we were suddenly sitting at the peace table, negotiating a new peace that had not been seen in sixty years.

And this is what I’ve come to realize about President Trump, which is that he zigs before he zags. And his diplomatic style is to look at a situation where there’s a long-standing status quo, that we’re unhappy with… that most people are unhappy with… but there’s an inertia behind it. There is no real impetus for change, because everyone is kind of content in this situation. And he manufactures a crisis, to get people to the negotiating table, to find a new situation. That’s what he did in Korea.

Frankly, that’s what he’s doing with trade. With threatening these tariffs. As a libertarian, I don’t support tariffs, and I think they are taxes on us. But I can recognize the play that he’s making. And the play is to use these mechanisms as a stick to create a temporary crises to get people at the negotiating table and to negotiate a better deal. And that’s what Trump is trying to do.

TLR: You’ve actually touched on something I was going to ask, about trade. Recently, the administration announced nearly $5 billion in agricultural subsidies in order to offset losses due to it’s trade war with China. Is such a position an admission of failure, or do you think his trade policies just need some breathing room for them to be successful long term as a type of negotiating tactic on trade, like you’ve said some of this was?

EB: I think what he’s trying to do is broadcast to other nations that he’s not going to be the first one to flinch. Obviously, I think that certainly the tariffs have resulted in harms for the American people. I think if the goal is to offs–… if we accept the fact that these tariffs are going to be in place… which of course is not an ideal situation– but if we accept that they are going to be in place and we want to offset the harm to specific industries– I disagree that the way to do that is with bailouts. Through taking taxpayer money from one person’s pocket and giving it to another person.

If we want to offset the harm, I would be open to exploring options that would include perhaps giving targeted tax relief. So if we say, the agricultural industry, or here in Maine for example– the lobster industry is potentially going to be negatively impacted as China has targeted lobster for tariffs. China is a big importer of lobster. What I would argue to do in that case, if we don’t see the trade war going away anytime soon, if we don’t see the tariffs going away anytime soon… let’s look at those industries that are being negatively impacted and give them targeted tax relief to offset the losses, so that they are paying less in taxes to the federal government rather than us taking money from one person’s pocket and giving to another.

TLR: This one’s a nice easy one… Angus King has voted to arm Syrian rebels. Is that wrong, is that dangerous, and why?

EB: That’s absolutely wrong and dangerous. You know, the Syrian rebels that Angus King and many in the Washington establishment have decided to arm are actively allied with groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. So this is the crazy thing about our foreign policy in the middle east. We went in there on the basis that we were attacked on 9-11. Which we were, and it definitely required a retaliation against those who attacked us.

Now, that was the basis for being over there. But we’ve been over there so long, the mission has become so muddled, that all of a sudden we are less concerned with the people that attacked us, and more concerned with secular dictatorships who we don’t like for various reasons. You know? We lost sight of Osama Bin Laden and went after Saddam Hussain. And Osama Bin Laden escaped, we took out Saddam Hussain, and we threw that whole region into chaos.

We’ve done the same thing in Libya. And now there’s so many in the Washington establishment like Angus King who want to see the same exact thing happen in Syria. We have not learned the lesson of the last two decades that toppling these regimes and nation building don’t work. It creates chaos and it gives rise to radical groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda that take hold in the area, that’s what we’ve seen happen, and that’s exactly what would happen with Syria. Now as we arm radical rebels in Syria who are opposed to the Assad regime, allied with ISIS and Al-Qaeda, we are in fact funding and perpetuating this civil war which is creating this refugee crisis in the area.

Now the irony, of course, is that Angus King says that he wants to bring refugees from Syria to Maine and to America. He’s got such a big heart for them, except he’s the one voting to arm the groups throwing them out of their homes. So if we want to address the refugee crisis in Syria, then we need to get rid of politicians like Angus King and we need to stop arming the rebel groups that are throwing them out of their homes.

TLR: You’ve talked about the differences before between healthcare and health insurance, and the dangers of health insurance companies getting between consumers and their product, often using government for their aims. What can or should government do in order to encourage a decoupling of the two concepts?

EB: Well, I think you’re absolutely right. I think the biggest problem in our healthcare industry is the dominance of the industry by third party payers. Be that government or insurance companies, we the patients do not directly pay for our care anymore. We still pay for it, but we pay for it indirectly. We pay a middleman. We pay government with our taxes, or we pay insurance companies through our premiums, and they come between us and our doctors. And it puts government and insurance companies in a very powerful position. Because they’re the customers for healthcare providers. We are not the customers. And businesses cater to their customers. So they’re not catering to us. We need to be the customers again.

Some of the policies that we could put in place to empower patients again? So one thing would be healthcare savings accounts. Allowing people to save for expected healthcare costs tax-free in a healthcare savings account. That’s one thing we could do.

Also, accepting the fact that we have a social safety net, programs like Medicare and Medicaid, accepting that these programs are there and designed to help people, especially Medicaid– designed to help people who are impoverished and perhaps can’t afford care, if we are going to have these programs in place? Then let’s look at how we can realign them with the goal of empowering the patient to make economic decisions for themselves, so that healthcare providers cater to them. If we’re going to be paying this taxpayer money out anyway in Medicaid, I would much rather give it to the patient as a voucher, rather than directly paying the healthcare provider. Because when you give it to the patient as a voucher? Suddenly, the healthcare provider has to cater to them. Has to find ways to keep them satisfied as a consumer. There are ways to employ and use free market principles while still having a social safety net to cover the least fortunate among us.

TLR: That’s a great answer.

This afternoon, Rand Paul endorsed Gary Johnson for Senate in New Mexico. Would you like an opportunity to also endorse Gary Johnson right now?

EB: I’ve met Gary Johnson several times. I remember the first time I met Gary Johnson. He was getting ready to run for President in 2012. I was living in New York City. I met with him, I talked with him for a good half an hour, hour, I was very impressed with him. And then, I remember meeting him a few years later and… look, I was just a young liberty activist, and there was no reason he should have remembered me, but I remember he came up to me and said “It’s good to see you again, Eric.” And I just thought, wow… how does this guy… he’s such a good politician, he still remembers my name after meeting me years prior.

I think that Gary Johnson would be one of the best US Senators in the US Senate were he to win. I think he would be there on a lot of issues that are near and dear to my heart as a libertarian. Now, he’s not a perfect libertarian, but there are very few people who are perfect libertarians. In fact, if you ask most libertarians, there’s only one person who’s a perfect libertarian, and that’s whoever that person is.

TLR: Absolutely. Everyone else is a statist, of course.

EB: Right, right, right. “And no one else is a real libertarian except for me, I’m the only one who’s doing it right.” I don’t really think that. I support anyone and everyone who is trying to promote the cause of liberty in whatever path they are doing so. Whether that’s through the Republican party, or other parties. Whether through political means or nonpolitical means. I think that we should all support and encourage the cause of liberty wherever it is being advanced, anywhere.

And so, uh… for Gary Johnson running for US Senate? I hope that he wins. I would love to serve alongside him in the US Senate.