Chase Oliver on Budget Cuts, War, and Immigration

A self-described political junkie since birth, Libertarian presidential nominee Chase Oliver's activism started on the left in the 2000s, pushing back against Republicans for starting two wars in the Middle East. Once President Barack Obama took office, Oliver saw the left wasn't much different from the right. "That outraged me," he says.

At the 2010 Atlanta Pride Festival, the openly gay Oliver came across the Libertarian Party. "They were like, 'No, we're the real anti-war party….Also, by the way, we think you should be able to love who you want to love.'" Oliver has voted for the Libertarian Party in every major election since.

He launched his first campaign in 2020, with a special election for the House of Representatives. In 2022 he made a bid to represent Georgia in the Senate. In both elections, he earned more than 2 percent of the vote; in the latter race, that was enough to force a run-off between Republican Herschel Walker and the eventual victor, Democrat Raphael Warnock. This year, at the Libertarian National Convention, it took seven ballots for Oliver to secure the party's presidential nomination, rising from less than 20 percent on the first ballot to more than 60 percent on the final one.

Yet Oliver is arguably the most controversial presidential candidate in party history. He didn't support mask or vaccine mandates during COVID-19. He did, however, wear a mask and get vaccinated, which alienated some high-profile members of the Libertarian Party's Mises Caucus. His support for large-scale immigration, abortion rights, and the rights of trans kids, along with their parents and doctors, to make decisions free from government involvement has also rankled the party's right wing. Some state affiliates have even tried to keep him from being listed on their ballots.

Oliver now finds himself running against another person who spoke at the Libertarian convention, Republican nominee Donald Trump, as well as Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. In July, Oliver spoke with Reason's Nick Gillespie about his journey to libertarianism, his thoughts on the political establishment, and how different his platform is from those of the two major parties. "Broadly speaking, I don't think much of the Democratic portfolio is super libertarian right now," he says. "Frankly, none of the Republican portfolio is very libertarian either."

Reason: Can you lay out the Chase Oliver presidential platform? What's your vision for America?

Oliver: I want to see an America that looks toward the future. I want to be looking long-term at how we make our economy more secure. How can we better serve the needs of our voters, and how can we increase the freedom of each and every individual to seek their American dream? That starts with relinquishing the control of the U.S. government and returning that control back to the free market. Also, of course, cutting our government down to where we're not running trillion-dollar deficits every year.

What should the federal government be spending per year? What would be your target for the annual budget, and where should the cuts come from?

Right now, we need to get ourselves at least to a balanced budget, and that involves cutting a lot of the third rails of American politics. Maybe it's because I'm under the age of 40, and I'm not afraid to address issues that are going to hit us in the long term, but we have to cut entitlements. We have to get out of the Ponzi scheme of Social Security. It involves untangling the government involvement in our health care system, including Medicare and Medicaid, and phasing those systems out over time so that way we can return back to normal market practices with health care.

We're talking major cuts. A 50 percent cut to the Pentagon, for instance, would still have us militarily capable of defending ourselves and warding off any invasion that we could ever have but it would take an awful lot of bureaucratic mess and red tape out of the Pentagon.

Social Security is one of the largest and most popular federal programs. How do you propose we transition away from it, especially considering its widespread support across generations?

We have to recognize that Social Security is insolvent. I'm 39 years old. If you're in my age range, you're going to keep paying into Social Security and not have benefits. Or we can get rid of the system overall [so] you're no longer paying your employee contribution. You contribute that to a mutual fund or a retirement account on your own, which will have better return on your investment.

Then the question is, what do we do about people who are on Social Security right now—people's parents or grandparents? You keep the system solvent long enough for that last generation to retire. But once they retire, we sundown the system entirely. We remove the system from our lives and return that back to individuals being able to save for themselves and their families. And at the community level, if there's people who are in need, that's why we have mutual and direct aid organizations and charity to be able to help those people.

How is this playing with younger people? Republicans and Democrats never talk about Social Security reform. Is this landing with people your age?

This is why we want an orderly transition away from the program. I don't want my parents and your grandparents to have to go off of what they've been dependent on—what they've paid into their entire life. But younger workers do recognize that they're not going to have Social Security whether they pay into it or not. Offering them the alternative of not having to pay into the system and investing in their own retirement is very attractive.

Medicare and Medicaid are deeply embedded in the American health care system, both at the federal and state level. How would you approach untangling these programs, given their role in supporting millions of Americans?

Again, I would like to sundown Medicare overall in the long run. If you see how much government has invested itself in the health care marketplace, that just shows you how much faster health care has risen—faster than inflation and other industries.

Seeing this, we recognize that the first thing we have to do is target areas where removing the regulatory framework actually lowers costs. First thing you want to be able to do is add market practices to the health care marketplace overall, like buying health insurance across state lines, which is something Republicans promise to do every four years. They never get that done.

You want to remove patent evergreening from drugs that have allowed things like insulin to remain super expensive. Democrats run on "I made insulin cheap for Medicare patients." Well, they didn't. That total cost burden is still spread across the entire program. If you were to remove patent evergreen, you would actually lower the cost of drugs, which would lower the cost of some of this program.

But overall, it's like trying to bail out a ship that's sinking. There's just not enough buckets. You eventually have to let the ship of Medicare sink. We have to recognize that, over time, this is driving up the cost of health care. And Medicare for All is loss of innovation for all, loss of choice for all, loss of marketplace practices for all, and that is a bad outcome. We do not want that.

What would your ideal immigration policy look like, and how would it address current immigration challenges?

My immigration policy is a 21st century Ellis Island. Four in 10 Americans can trace their heritage back to Ellis Island. I want to bring that back into the minds of Americans when they think about immigration today. Come through a port of entry, declare who you are, get a quick background check, and then come in this country with legal status to work.

This does several things. One, it prevents wages from being driven down. [Illegal] immigrant labor drives down [wages] because they have to accept less payment for fear of deportation. Now you'll have workers competing on a level playing field.

Two, this is safer for our communities. Right now, if you're an immigrant and you see a crime occurring, you might not want to go to the police and report that for fear of putting your name on an official document and having that traced back to you without documentation or legal status.

And three, it actually allows our law enforcement to laser focus on the real crimes going on in our southern border. Things like human trafficking for the purposes of labor or sexual exploitation, or for people pressing fentanyl to look like Xanax pills. That's fraud. I'm a Libertarian. I want to legalize all drugs, but to cause overdoses is a real crime. If people who want to just come here to work can legally pass through a port of entry, we can really focus on those who are wanting to do harm in the United States.

Immigration has become a top concern for many Americans, with both the right and left expressing concern. Why do you think this issue has inspired such anxiety, and how does your approach address these concerns?

Part of that, to be frank, is masterful marketing on the part of conservative media to scare people into feeling like we're in some sort of immigrant crime wave, when if you just look at crime statistics we're near historic lows. We had an uptick during the beginning of COVID because, of course, anytime there's economic insecurity, you're going to see an uptick in crime. But now we have crime returning back to historic lows, yet we see stories of immigrants hurting people on the news every night.

This is done because it generates electoral fodder. It creates a wedge. I encourage people who are skeptics to look at the numbers, look at the statistics, and not be fooled by what they see on the news or a podcast that isn't really looking into the data.

Government itself is what makes the immigration process so chaotic. It's a long, complicated process. If you streamline a process, more people will go through it. If you make it more easily accessible, less expensive, and less time-consuming, people will do that as opposed to illegally coming across the border.

Let's pivot to your critiques of the current political establishment. What are your primary issues with Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party?

As [district attorney] in San Francisco, she put a lot of good people in jail for the crime of consuming cannabis while she even admitted on The Breakfast Club [a radio show] that she was a user of cannabis. She laughed about wanting to jail parents of truant students, as if jailing the parents of kids who are skipping school is going to make their education outcomes better. She was generally uncaring when it came to being the [attorney general]—keeping people in prison past their sentences so they could maintain volunteer firefighters with the prison firefighters.

There's a lot of scummy things she's done in her record that make her not fit to be president. Generally, the Democratic Party is a party that is a big spending party. I think they exacerbate a lot of the social issues that we're seeing in a way that's not productive.

What about Donald Trump and the GOP? What concerns you most about their direction?

What we see with Donald Trump is a departure, but not the departure that you want to see. It's a departure toward rank authoritarianism. He's not leaning toward more libertarianism, more liberalism. He's using the flex and the power of the government's muscle to attack those that he feels aren't worthy.

Just the way he cracks down upon immigration—that even Dreamers are in the target. These are young people who were brought to this country through no fault of their own. They've really only known the United States. But much of the rhetoric that comes out of the Republican Party is very much against them, and they're much in the sights of the people who were holding those "Mass Deportation Now" signs at the RNC.

You've had an interesting political journey, starting on the left and now running as a Libertarian. Can you share how your views evolved and what led you to the Libertarian Party?

I've always been kind of a political junkie. Even when I was little, I always liked to watch speeches; I always enjoyed watching election night coverage. But what really got me involved as an activist was 9/11 had happened, and I saw the war starting. I was already skeptical when we started the war in Afghanistan, but what really ignited my skepticism was the war in Iraq and seeing that the CIA was manipulating and cherry-picking intelligence to create this case for war that just really wasn't realistic. There was no there there. And that outraged me.

Because George Bush was the Republican prosecuting that war, I just kind of reflexively fell in line with Democrats. There have always been orthodoxies that Democrats have not liked about me. I've always liked guns. I've always hated taxes and been kind of a free market guy. But because they were anti-war, because they were pro-LGBT, I was like, "OK, this is where I belong."

Then, in the primary in 2008, we had Hillary Clinton, who was like Dick Cheney in a pantsuit, and we had Barack Obama, who was saying stuff about ending wars and closing Guantanamo and "I'm going to meet with the leaders of Iran without precondition." That sounded very attractive to the anti-war movement, so a lot of us fought really hard to help him win that primary and eventually help him win that election.

And then he did none of it—and got a Nobel Peace Prize for doing none of it. And that outraged me, and it pushed me. I started identifying in about 2010 as an independent. And I was at the Pride Festival in Atlanta in 2010, and that's where I met the Libertarian Party of Georgia. That's where I first got introduced to Libertarian Party, and they were like, "No, we're the real anti-war party. Our anti-war position is principled in the ideas of nonaggression. Also, by the way, we think you should be able to love who you want to love." That earned that candidate for governor, John Monds, my first Libertarian vote, and I have voted Libertarian in every major election since.

Can you outline your preferred foreign policy?

My preferred foreign policy is exporting our values via voluntary trade and exchange and not militarism. I would seek to basically close overseas bases, remove our military footprint, and bring our military back in line with its true mission, which should be defending ourselves from invasion, not exporting and going into war all over the world.

Given your stance on minimizing military entanglements, do you believe the U.S. should still maintain alliances where we pledge to defend other nations if they are attacked?

We can broadly have market relationships and allyships and friendships with nations all over the world. But we should not be contingent on "If you're attacked we must defend," because there can be contingencies where that shouldn't be the case.

I prefer to keep ourselves free from foreign entanglements, as our first president highlighted the need to do. But that doesn't mean that we can't rise to the need of our friends, just like we did in World War II. When we were attacked, we immediately joined in the fight.

Should we be funding Ukraine and sending them weapons?

No. We've already sent hundreds of billions at this point. Europe should be leading that fight. If they're going to militarily engage, they're the ones who are most directly threatened.

If I were president, my policy would be allowing refugees to come to the United States who are in the middle of the firefight, so that way we can get innocent people out of the war zone as well as providing amnesty for any person who's conscripted to fight in a war they don't want to fight in, which is what most of the Russian military is at this point. Conscription is slavery. You shouldn't be forced to fight in a war. And I can think of no better use of amnesty than allowing those who've been politically forced to fight in a war to no longer have to do so.

You've said that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide. Is that an accurate description of your view of Israel's actions in Gaza?

When you look at the definitions that are brought forward by the International Criminal Court, I think much of the standards there have been met by the practices of the Israeli government.

That's to the detriment of the Israeli people, who would like to see a more peaceful and stable Israel, who would like to see a more peaceful and stable region.

Given the deep U.S. involvement in the Middle East, do you believe we should completely withdraw, or is there a role for the U.S. in brokering peace in the region?

We need to be removing our military footprint as quickly and orderly as possible so that it can be done in a way that's responsible, not like what we saw with the Afghanistan withdrawal. But we do need to withdraw ourselves completely from the Middle East.

The best thing we can do is be a neutral arbiter. What we should not be doing is putting our thumb on the scale. That's what we've been doing and it's not led to better outcomes. In fact, it's led to more turmoil and more tension in the region.

How do you view China in relation to the U.S.? Are China's national interests inherently at odds with ours?

I think they're definitely an economic adversary in the world—the fact that they are trying to manipulate currency to give themselves a larger stake in terms of the economy. But instead of raising up protectionist tariff barriers that make things more expensive for consumers here in the United States, we need to be calling China's bluff and continuing to engage in as much foreign trade with them as possible.

When you do that, you're making them inflate that currency manipulation balloon. Eventually, it will burst. Once it does, there's going to be a major recession in China, and the people of China will be requesting more market liberalism and less protectionism. That's the way we can actually compete with them. Not try to put up trade barriers but actually continue trading and let them continue to try to keep up.

The [Chinese Communist Party] will eventually fall behind, and it will be their own doing. It's like the guy-puts-the-stick-in-the-bike meme. That's what China's about to do [to] themselves. They're about to shove that stick in the front tire and flip face-forward because they've been doing this kind of market practice for years.

Would you advocate for more open immigration policies to attract top talent from countries like China, especially in the event of economic downturns there?

Oh, yeah. If China goes through a major recession, you're going to see a lot of brain drain coming out of that nation and toward the United States. So certainly, in those conditions we would benefit, and we benefit right now if we ease immigration to be allowing the best and the brightest to come here to go to school here and then stay here after they've gone to school.

At the Libertarian National Convention earlier this year, Donald Trump said he would commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road website, and appoint a libertarian to a Cabinet position. Do you believe him?

It's hard to trust Donald Trump. It really is. Just based on his record, the things that he said in the past. He's failed a lot of promises. I would like to see him, if he were elected, commute Ross Ulbricht's sentence. Frankly, if I were president, I would give him a full pardon.

It would be good to see Ross free. Do I trust that he is going to do that? Not really, because it's hard for me to trust anything he says.

As regards putting a libertarian in the Cabinet, I think that "libertarian" is going to look more like [Utah] Republican Sen. Mike Lee than, say, a Spike Cohen or a Chase Oliver or a Dave Smith. He's going to pick a libertarian Republican and say, "That's my libertarian that I put in there." Donald Trump doesn't really know what a libertarian is.

Do you think Kamala Harris might incorporate any libertarian principles into her platform, or is that unlikely?

It's hard for me to think of one off the bat, because her policy style is to always use more government instead of less government. Possibly you might see some ease of restriction on immigration from her. But I don't think she's going to fix the problem, as we've seen with her being in charge of the issue for the Biden administration.

Broadly speaking, I don't think much of the Democratic portfolio is super libertarian right now. So I'm not anticipating a lot of that. Frankly, none of the Republican portfolio is very libertarian either, other than the same lip service about cutting government spending and cutting the size of government. I'll believe that when I see it.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.