Libertarian Stewart: Solving four key issues for Iowa

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Rick Stewart’s priorities if elected Iowa’s secretary of agriculture are simple. But putting them into action could make profound changes in the way Iowa farmers and others operate.

He uses the initials RWST to help people remember those top issues — renewable fuel standards, water, subsidies and tariffs.

Stewart, the Libertarian candidate for ag secretary, stopped at the Press office last week to talk about his campaign and his proposals.

He was accompanied by Charles Aldrich, the Libertarian candidate for U.S. House District 4 in Iowa, which includes Floyd County. The interview with Aldrich was in Tuesday’s Press and a longer version is available at www.charlescitypress.com.

Stewart, age 67, who lives in Cedar Rapids, started Frontier Natural Products as a member-owned cooperative in Norway, Iowa, to supply herbs and spices to natural food stores, turning it into a $200 million business with 300 employees.

He was named Iowa Small Businessperson of the Year in 1992.

Stewart, who has a degree in accounting and economics from Coe College and an MBA from the University of Chicago, retired as CEO of the company at age 48 “because I wanted to explore the world and do other things.”

He said he developed a strong interest in politics in 2012 when he tried unsuccessfully to get Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson to be allowed to participate in the national presidential debates.

He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2014 as an independent candidate against Joni Ernst and Bruce Braley and came in third, receiving three times as many votes as Libertarian candidate Douglas Butzier.

“I got more votes in 2014 than any independent in Iowa history,” said Stewart.

Asked why he’s running for secretary of agriculture, he replies, “It’s real simple. There are things that need to change.”

He launches into an impassioned explanation of his RWST priorities, beginning with R, the renewable fuels standard, a federal mandate that refiners have to buy a certain amount of ethanol or other renewable fuels to add to gasoline.

“It’s a bad economic idea and we need to get rid of it,” he said. “It’s just methamphetamine for corn farmers. It gets them excited, it gets them high and it gets them active and energetic, but just like the meth addict they’re gonna crash, because that is a political program. Political winds change. You can pretend that they’re not going to change or you can accept that they’re going to change and get off.”

Stewart said he would eliminate the renewable fuels standard over 10 years.

“We’ll get rid of that because it’s not economic. It impoverishes the country even if it makes a few Iowa corn farmers better off,” he said. “It’s just not an economic idea, it’s a political idea.”

Stewart said the market would do a better job of setting the amount of renewable fuels that people want to purchase and refiners make available to sell.

W is for water.

“To the shame of our state we have turned into a polluting state,” Stewart said. “We knowingly allow most of our pollution to go downhill into our neighbors.”

Stewart wants to divide the state into watershed cooperatives and make each landowner responsible for making sure that the water leaving the landowner’s property is at least as clean as the water than entered it.

He called his plan the simplest, cheapest, fastest and most effective way to address the state’s water quality problems. He would make every person responsible for ending pollution on their own property, but would not mandate the way that goal is accomplished.

“Some of them will be fast and cheap and some will be slow and expensive, but they’re all going to figure it out and they’re going to share knowledge and we’re going to have clean water and we’re going to make Iowa proud again,” Stewart said.

“In this day and age, on every inch of Iowa land we know where the watershed is. And, guess what, you’re a member if you own property. I could have every co-op set up by the end of this year.

“People wouldn’t pollute if the cost of pollution was included in the price of production. Let the free market work, and government get out of the way,” he said.

“S, subsidies — they’re the opiods of farming. If you want to get off government welfare we need to reduce government subsidies. But we’re not just going to cut the rope today, we’re not sending you over the waterfall. Again, it’s 10 and out.”

Stewart said farmers cash the government checks because they wouldn’t be smart not to, but with those checks come restrictions on what farmers can do.

“Those checks come with rope that ties your hands,” he said. “All of a sudden you’re farming for the government, not for yourself. No Iowa farmer wants to be told how to farm. Let’s get the government out of the business of taking money out of my pocket and giving it to you.”

T — tariffs.

“Tariffs are for losers,” Stewart said. “You can’t find an economist who won’t tell you tariffs are bad. Tariffs always hurt the country that imposes them more than they hurt the country against whom they are imposed.”

He said the United States should eliminate all tariffs. Eventually other countries will see it’s in their best interests to do the same thing, but even if they don’t it will still be better for the U.S.

Stewart said the Libertarian Party is growing, and it takes the best ideas of the left and the best of the right without taking the fringe elements of either of the other two major parties.

“The way I get votes is I have to earn them,” he said. “I can’t buy them, and the way to earn them is to educate people, and really it’s shaking hands and it’s the tortoise and the hare and I readily admit I’m the tortoise.

“But the Libertarian Party is growing and people’s understanding of Libertarianism is growing, and slowly but surely I think we’re winning.

“The vast majority of Americans want to be left alone,” he said “They’d like the government not to take all their money away to give to someone else, and they’d like to get out of all the foreign wars.

“My job is to, one by one, win them over by good policies and honesty and truth-speaking, even when it hurts. But I’m not going to get nasty. I’m not going to tell you Trump is the devil or Steve King is the devil. I’m not going to scare you into voting for me because I’m not a scared person. I’m not scared.

“This is the greatest country in the history of the world,” Stewart said. “We have gone downhill even as we’ve become better. Our income is up at the same time our inequality is up. We don’t have to have that. The simplest way to solve inequality is to make everybody rich.”