Speech to the Illinois Center Right Coalition (I.C.R.C.) on August 20th, 2016

Written on August 19th and 20th, 2016
Delivered in person on August 20th, 2016
Edited on October 5th and 15th, 2016

Some content originally appeared in
“Address to the Illinois Center-Right Coalition (I.C.R.C.) on June 25th, 2016”
written on June 24th and 25th, 2016
and edited on July 19th, and August 8th, 22nd and 23rd, 2016

            Good afternoon and thank you for having me. My name is Joe Kopsick, I live in Lake Bluff, and I’m running for the U.S. House of Representatives’ seat from Illinois’s 10th District. My candidacy has been endorsed by Timothy Goodcase, David Earl Williams, Dan Rutherford, Mike Psak, Charles Allan January, Phil Collins, and William Leubscher; and vetted by the Illinois LiberTEA organization.           
            My district is Illinois’s 10th, which is most of Lake County and parts of Cook County. There, incumbent Republican Bob Dold is being challenged by former congressman Democrat Brad Schneider. I am a write-in candidate, and I am the only other candidate in the race besides Dold and Schneider.        
            I entered the race in November because I felt that the candidates were not ideologically diverse enough, that neither candidate was ideologically consistent, and that their records didn’t sufficiently support constitutional limitations on the powers of the federal government. In my opinion, both candidates supported growth of the size, scope, and cost of government; and supported continued and increased federal involvement in issues that rightfully belong to the states and to the people. For example, both of my opponents support domestic surveillance, gun control, foreign aid, sanctions, keeping Obamacare in place, and federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
            As for me, the major themes of my candidacy are: liberty and limited government; non-interventionism in foreign policy; personal freedom and individual rights; due process, and security through privacy; balanced budgets and fiscal solvency; free movement of labor and capital; and the notion that government should be funded through penalties on waste, rather than through taxation of labor, sales, and investment that has the effect of discouraging those types of productive behavior.
  
            If elected, I would vote to eliminate and/or restructure between four and seven unconstitutional executive departments; decrease spending by between $1.25 and $1.75 trillion, fire dozens of executive “czars”; and devolve the issues of health, education, retirement savings, and the social safety net back to the states. 
           I would help reduce the size of the federal workforce by voting to abolish the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Education, Interior, and Housing and Urban Development; and I would additionally support either abolishing the Department of Homeland Security, or restructuring segments of it under the Departments of Justice and Defense.

            On spending, I would vote to support a Cut, Cap, and Balance plan that requires at least a 7-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases; and I would also support a Balanced Budget Amendment. I would additionally support decreasing taxes across the board; while making all tax rates flat, while keeping tax cuts in place; and eliminating loopholes, tax credits, and differential taxation.

           In the short term, would vote to support a reduction of the individual income tax rates to between 12.5% and 20%. I would support the abolition of the personal income tax, and repealing the 16th Amendment, unless the Negative Income Tax were to be passed. On taxes in general, I would favor transitioning to a Georgist Single Tax on the abuse, misuse, and blight of landed property, which would involve paying fees to communities and community land and water trusts in exchange for the privilege to extract natural resources. However, I would only be in the position of urging states to experiment with this, being a candidate for federal office.
     I support real free trade, and the free movement of capital and labor, as opposed to "smart trade" or "managed trade". I believe free trade can be fair trade; I believe that tariffs only contribute to human rights abuses and labor abuses of foreign workers, in order to increase profits by avoiding the price of the tariffs. I favor real free trade, and I don't think treaties are necessary to do that. I worry that too much intellectual property protections [in trade agreements] reverses what abolishing tariffs aims to do, which is decrease prices.
     I would vote to audit the Federal Reserve, and make sure that the value of the dollar is stable and increasing, so that the dollar has enough purchasing power to buy what people need. I would do all of this in order to avoid raising the minimum wage; I would not vote to support raising the minimum wage. I would vote to cut corporate welfare before considering reducing the social safety net; I think corporate welfare only makes that [the social safety net] seem necessary.
     I want to work with people on the left who recognize that it is federal law that creates free-riders in workplaces, but have a problem with Right to Work. I would support the right of states to pass Right to Work laws, but I would discourage it, because it interferes with the rights of unions and businesses to [become parties to] contract. I think the way to solve that is to urge states to require employers to tell prospective employees that they will be required to join a union as a condition of being hired.
     I would vote to devolve education to the states, and abolish the Department of Education. I would make sure that No Fly No Buy lists take transparency and due process into account