All-American Presidential Forums on PBS" Moderated by Tavis Smiley

FORUM RESPONSES

Well, the main reason I'm here is because I was invited. And I'm delighted that I was invited. And I'm very pleased, because I go wherever I'm invited to talk about freedom. That, to me, is the most important thing, along with the emphasis on the Constitution.

I believe so strongly that individuals have their rights and their life as a gift from God, and the purpose of government is to protect life and liberty.

But I'd also like to extend that. If you have the fruits of your labor, I would like you to keep the fruits of your labor as well.

And under those conditions and under a freedom philosophy and under the Constitution, we would be so much more prosperous, because we wouldn't be policing the world, we would be bringing our troops home, and we would take care of our people here at home.

I would like to believe that if we had a freer society, it would take care of Blacks and whites and everybody equally because we're all individuals. To me, that is so important. But if we had equal justice under the law, I think it would be a big improvement. If we had probably a repeal of most of the federal laws on drugs and the unfairness on how Blacks are treated with these drugs laws, it would be a tremendous improvement.

And also, I think that if you're going to have prosperity, it serves everybody. And if this is done by emphasizing property rights and freedom of the individuals, making sure that the powerful special interests don't control Washington, that the military industrial complex doesn't suck away all the wealth of the country, and then we would have prosperity.

This is what we need and we need to share it. The free society is the only society that can provide goods and services and distribute them in the most fair manner. And that is the society that I would advocate and argue for and believe it's available to us.

Walter Williams, a very astute free-market economist, has studied this extensively, and he has found that prior to minimum wage laws there was no discrepancy like this. So he put a lot of blame on the minimum wage law. Once government gets interfering, this takes away opportunities. And I believe there is a lot of truth to this because it eliminates an opportunity and a chance for a marginal worker.

So once again, though, the economy is supported only when you have a sound economy perpetuated by a government with sound policies. You have to have sound money. You have to have minimum taxes. You have to have, you know, a wise foreign policy.

But I have a bill in that might help a lot of people, Black or white or whomever. I have a bill in that would immediately help these people who are trying to get a start, that they would never have to pay any taxes or payroll taxes, if they just happen to be a waiter or a waitress, to give them a chance to get ahead and get a good job.

I would not sign a bill like you describe, because it would be construed – and it would be amnesty, and I haven't supported amnesty.

I also think that it's pretty impractical to get an army in this country to round up 12 or maybe 20 million. But I do believe that we have to stick to our guns on obeying the law, and anybody who comes in here illegally shouldn't be rewarded. And that would be the case.

But I see the immigration problem as a consequence of our welfare state. Welfare because we encourage people not to work here, but the welfare we offer the people who come – they get free medical care. They get free education. They bankrupt our hospitals. Our hospitals are closing. And it shouldn't be rewarded. That means that if you don't round them up, you don't reward them, you don't give them citizenship. At the same time, you can't solve this problem until you have – you get rid of the welfare state, because in a healthy economy, immigrants wouldn't be a threat to us. There would probably be a desire for more, because we would be starved for workers.

But today, they have become scapegoated because of the weak economy and the lowering of our standard of living.

A system designed to protect individual liberty will have no punishments for any group and no privileges. Today, I think inner-city folks and minorities are punished unfairly in the war on drugs.

For instance, Blacks make up 14 percent of those who use drugs, yet 36 percent of those arrested are Blacks and it ends up that 63 percent of those who finally end up in prison are Blacks. This has to change.

We don't have to have more courts and more prisons. We need to repeal the whole war on drugs. It isn't working.

We have already spent over $400 billion since the early 1970s, and it is wasted money. Prohibition didn't work. Prohibition on drugs doesn't work. So we need to come to our senses.

And, absolutely, it's a disease. We don't treat alcoholics like this. This is a disease, and we should orient ourselves to this. That is one way you could have equal justice under the law.

It's very clear, under the Constitution, that we couldn't give the vote to the residents of D.C. without an amendment to the Constitution. And it should be pursued in that manner.

But when it comes to national ID cards, the identification, I think the states have the prerogative and the right and the obligations to identify the voters and they should.

But the reason I get worried about when we start talking about it nationally is, you know, they might want to use the Real ID. They might want to think it's a good excuse to have a national ID card to vote, and I am positively opposed to any move toward the national ID card.

We've had managed care in this country since the early '70s, and it hasn't worked well. It's very, very expensive, and it's the fault that we changed our ERISA law and our tax laws that created this corporatism that runs medicine. Wall Street rakes off the profits. The patients are unhappy. The doctors are unhappy. And it's a monopoly now. Who lobbies us in Washington? The drug companies and the HMOs. They come.

And now what is the cry for? Socialized medicine. That's not the answer. We need to get the government out of the way. Inflation hits the middle class and the poor the most. Those are the people who are losing it. It's just not minorities, anybody poor, because inflation wipes out the middle class, and we have to deal with that.

If you have a product that's not dealt with by government, prices go down when you have modern technology. And medicine, with all this technology, prices still go up. But that's because the government is involved.

We don't have enough competition. There's a doctor monopoly out there. We need alternative health care freely available to the people. They ought to be able to make their own choices and not controlled by the FDA preventing them to use some of the medications.

The most important promise we keep is the oath to obey the Constitution. We just shouldn't be going to all these wars.

We shouldn't have so many injured and in our hospitals because we shouldn't go to war unless it's declared.

If it's declared, we should go win it and get it over with. Now we're in this war for five years or so and nobody sees the end to this.

So, we went in under false pretense. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There are still – there are still people who believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, yet 15 of the people were from Saudi Arabia.

We need to live up to our principles so there are less injured veterans, but when they come home we better jolly well take care of them, and we're not doing a very good job right now, because all the money's going overseas.

We're broke. We got to do something about it.

And we can't – we can't perpetuate a welfare state and police an empire without going bankrupt.

And we're nearly on the verge of that.

The U.S. government has no authority. There's no constitutional authority. There's no moral authority. There's plenty of moral authority and responsibility for individuals to participate. But every time we get involved, no matter where, for good intentions, believe me, we're getting involved in a civil war.

Even when you send food, it ends up in the hands of the military and they use it as weapons. So it's not well-intended. We should direct our attention only to national security and not get involved for these feel-good reasons of going overseas for the various reasons.

And this is the main reason why I think we ought to just come home from every place in the world and bring our troops home from Iraq.

You know, over the years, I've held pretty rigid all my beliefs, but I've changed my opinion about the death penalty. For federal purposes, I no longer believe in the death penalty. I believe it has been issued unjustly. If you're rich, you get away with it; if you're poor and you're from the inner city, you're more likely to be prosecuted and convicted.

Today, with the DNA evidence, there have been too many mistakes. So I am now opposed to the federal death penalty.