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Libertarian candidate says he’s best chance to beat King in District 4

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

If Democrats want to defeat Republican Rep. Steve King for the U.S. House District 4 seat, the easiest way to do that might be by backing the Libertarian candidate, according to two Libertarians who stopped in Charles City last week.

Charles Aldrich, who is the Libertarian candidate for the District 4 seat in the Nov. 6 election, and Rick Stewart, the Libertarian candidate for secretary of agriculture, stopped by the Press office to talk about their races, their priorities and the challenges they face. The interview with Stewart will be in the Wednesday Press.

Charles Aldrich
Charles Aldrich

Aldrich stressed that the Libertarian party is now the third major party, along with the Republicans and Democrats.

“We’d like to be treated as a major party, not a third party,” he said.

Libertarian candidates received enough support in the 2016 election that they are now allowed to take part in the party primary process and the party’s candidates are guaranteed a spot on state ballots. Libertarian is now also offered as one of the party options when people register to vote.

Aldrich, age 61, is from Clarion and is a manufacturing engineer. He spent four years in the Marines, including serving on the U.S.S. Midway aircraft carrier when it was stationed in the Indian Ocean as a show of force during President Jimmy Carter’s presidency and the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

Aldrich said his candidacy can attract independent voters as well as some Republicans who don’t want to support King but who would never vote for a Democrat.

Two years ago, when Aldrich ran for U.S. Senate against Charles Grassley and Patty Judge, he received almost 42,000 votes.

“Two years ago there were between eight- and nine-thousand registered Libertarians,” Aldrich said. “I know it wasn’t just the independents. There had to be some Democrats and Republicans who said, ‘wait, this guy has some good ideas.”

One of those ideas is his plan for people earning at the lowest part of the wage scale, he said.

“Some people are working for less than $350 a week, which puts them into poverty,” he said. “I’d like no confiscation of funds from people who are working for poverty wages.”

What that would mean, he said, is that there would be no taxes taken out of the paychecks of people earning $350 or less, and governments wouldn’t be allowed to garnish wages for such things as student loans or other debts from paychecks at that level.

“The first $350 should go to the person so they have something to live on,” he said. “Even with slavery, the slave owner had to provide some place for the slave to reside, and that $350 is just basically saying ‘we’re going to let you live and survive.’”

Aldrich said that threshold would also apply to employers, who wouldn’t have to pay taxes on the first $350 a week.

“It’s a detriment to pay taxes on someone you’ve hired and it’s a betterment to the community by having that person employed instead of whatever else they were doing,” he said.

Aldrich said he would also prohibit the government from taking money from any financial account below $2,000, using that figure as the amount that might typically be needed to pay a month’s worth of bills.

“We would put a limit saying you have to leave $2,000 in any account that would help people to be able to pay their monthly expenses,” he said.

Another area of emphasis for Aldrich is the war on drugs, which he would stop completely.

“I look at drugs that are legal and anyone can buy, like aspirin,” he said. “People are taking it and every year between 20 and 100 people die because of taking aspirin.

“People above 21 buy and drink alcohol and people are dying from alcohol. Marijuana, nobody has died from. So this is illegal and the other two are legal — I don’t see the logic,” he said.

People who are buying illegal drugs are buying them on the street and can’t be sure what they are really buying or if the drugs have been “cut” with substances that are harmful, he said.

“I’d rather see them get pharmaceutical-grade drugs so when they’re done taking the drugs there’s not the residual effect of what it was being cut with on the street,” Aldrich said. “It’s going to be better for society if we legalize them because then we’ll have more productive people and less people in prison.”

As part of his plan to end laws against drug use, the production of hemp would be allowed.

Even though hemp does not contain enough of the psychoactive chemical THC that is found in marijuana to get people high, its production has been linked to marijuana and production outlawed except for regulated research purposes, Aldrich said.

More than 50,000 products can be made from hemp, and when used as a border crop on farms it helps clean the soil and cleans the water passing through it.

“You can make a lot of different products, anywhere from textiles, building materials, food, ethanol — you can make more ethanol per acre from hemp than you can from corn,” he said.

Another priority would be to change the focus of the U.S. military, he said.

“The U.S. has military bases all over the world, and our military is offensive, not defensive. We go into other countries and try to persuade them to do things our way,” Aldrich said.

“We should be supporting the embassies in each of the countries with our military, but as far as dictating or persuading how different counties run their country, we should sustain from that.

“If we go defensive instead of offensive, offensive we’re building tanks. Defensive, we’re building weapons to take out tanks,” he said.

“A tank is going to cost a million dollars and more, and a weapon to take out a tank is going to be between one- and two-thousand dollars, so we could drastically cut the military budget without cutting the military if we switch from offensive to defensive, and that would help to balance the budget.”

Aldrich said he would also work to reduce and eventually eliminate tariffs as barriers to trade.

“It’s a process, it’s not going to be instantaneous. What I try to implement may take two years, it may take 10 years — not only putting forth the proposition but changing the minds of the other representatives so they would vote in agreement with me and vote what’s best for the constituents,” he said.

Aldrich will face longtime incumbent King and Democrat J.D. Scholten in the Nov. 6 election for U.S. House District 4. District 4 includes all of the northwest corner of the state, and as far east as Floyd and Chickasaw counties.

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