8TH DISTRICT CANDIDATE PROFILE: TLAPEK PUSHES FOR CONSIDERABLY LESS GOVERNMENT, LOWER TAXES

Five candidates are seeking to represent the 8th District in Congress. The Southeast Missourian asked all five candidates the same 14 questions, which we feel are major issues in this campaign. Their answers will appear in a candidate profile today through Friday. Ballot order was used to determine publication date.

1. What should we do to lower the national deficit? Should we cut taxes or cut spending, or both?

Tlapek: Well, both of those things. For most people those would seem to be the only two options or you could take the other point of view, too. We could also increase taxes and continue to increase spending, which is exactly what we're going to do. That is what's going to happen. Libertarians are famous for sometimes finding unusual, original solutions to problems. And one of the solutions that is proposed by Harry Brown, the Libertarian candidate for president, in solving the Social Security problem -- which everyone knows that entitlements are really the mother program of all programs that is what is sinking the ship and he is attempting in service to the country to try to address the major problem -- and as part of that solution and also, I've heard Republicans talk about this too, selling off part of the federal assets. And so those two alternatives -- raising taxes, lowering taxes, increasing spending, decreasing spending, are not necessarily the only solutions; they seem to be the most obvious solutions, but they're not the only solutions. There's also the possibility of selling off some federal assets because we're basically broke. I think when you're broke you have to look at selling off some assets.

Yes, I definitely think taxes could be cut. I have asked people to try to examine how they feel about government and ask them some very fundamental questions and one of those questions is how much of your income does the government actually have a right to take? Phrased that way, and forced to answer that question, I generally get one of two answers. First answer is, `I don't care how much they take, it's what I get back.' The other answer, `I want about 10 percent,' seems reasonable because that's generally enough for most churches, which I think even Libertarians will tolerate 10 percent taxes if that were taking care of government at all levels. But we are morally opposed to taxation because we don't think anyone has the right to take your money from you, no matter how good their cause is. The other point of view, however, the one that says I don't care how much government takes from me, it's what I get back, that's really the most popular feeling, I think, about taxes. My feeling is we have made ourselves about half slaves in this country, if you can, and I think you can, fairly define a slave as someone who has to give up 100 percent of the fruits of his labor for someone else's benefit. We are currently giving 50 percent of the fruits of our labor for someone else's benefit so we are all about half slaves. Even if massa is going to buy a house, is going to provide you all the necessities, food, clothing, shelter, your medical care, your burial policy, enough education to follow massa's orders, even if massa provides you with all of these things, does that make you any less a slave?

2. Would you support a balanced budget amendment?

Tlapek: I don't know that I would support it. I guess I wouldn't support a balanced budget amendment because I think the more important discussion is that we reduce government spending. A balanced budget, I'm afraid that would be considered a mandate for the government to raise taxes. The American people really want a balanced budget. How can we get a balanced budget? We are unable to control our spending so the alternative is to raise taxes and the American people have told us that's what they want because they want a balanced budget. I don't think we need a balanced budget amendment. I think we need for Congress to act fiscally responsible and reduce spending. And I think the Republican Congress proved that we can't reduce spending one program at a time; that the only way we can possibly reduce government spending is to put all of the special interests in one boat together, in lieu of any sort of a major cutback in government spending. Because I don't think the American people want that. It's too dramatic a change. People are generally afraid of change. I think that the alternative is to put all the special interests in the same boat so that you've got all the different agencies, all the different programs, all the different cabinet level positions, you've all got the same amount of money to work with that you had last year but you can't have anymore. So the special interests don't have anybody to go to and cry to and say you're treating me unfairly because they're all being treated the same.

3. What is your stand on the abortion issue? Do you favor a constitutional amendment banning abortions? Do you support a ban on partial ban abortions?

Tlapek: There are two factions in the Libertarian Party. This is one of the few issues which Libertarians analyze and logically conclude differently. Some people define, some people view that the unborn child is an independent entity with its own set of rights. Others would say that no, the only entity is the mother and that is the only person who has rights which are to be protected. I may at some later point decide that I want to work toward convincing people that the fetus, the unborn child, is a separate entity with its own set of rights. But right now I am most concerned about trying to identify and protect the rights of the born. And I would then, therefore, not be in favor of a Constitutional amendment banning abortions and I think that Walter Williams put it best in a column that you published in your very own paper when he said that we're basically letting the camel's nose under the tent if we ban partial birth abortions, that the definition of birth basically is whenever the head passes through the birth canal and so I thought he expressed that idea pretty well. I appreciate the people who feel very strongly about abortion and I applaud their efforts to try to keep people from having abortions by any voluntary means that they can find to persuade people to not have abortions. And the Libertarian Party is such a logical organization. I would encourage people to think logically about abortion. If you think that abortion is murder, then presumably you would want to see the person who commits the abortion treated as a murderer. So I think maybe people who say it's murder, it's murder, it's murder, but don't say then let's string the mother up, let's string the doctor up, maybe they feel a little bit more moderate about the issue than actually thinking it's actually murder. And if you don't think it's murder, then what is it? And I think really we have to consider it -- at this point, I am promoting what the Libertarian Party and its platform believes -- that it is birth control. The mother is the one that has the rights and those are the rights which must be defended and the woman has the right to birth control.

4. Under the Medicare plan the Republican Congress passed but Clinton vetoed, did Medicare spending increase? What action or actions should be taken to keep Medicare from going bankrupt?

Tlapek: Well, I don't believe this is a real question. Everyone knows the government has no intentions of doing anything but spending more and more money. Maybe the American people are fooled by the semantics of the issue. In fact, if my candidacy could do anything, I wish it could expose for the people that there's no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties, for one party they truly are. By Jo Ann Emerson's own words at one of the debates, she defined a liberal as somebody who wants larger government or more government. But the liberals want more government. Conservatives want less government. By her own definition, she's a liberal if she considers herself a Republican. Bob Dole, in the first presidential debate, said that the difference between himself and President Clinton was that the Republicans want the government spending to grow by 14 percent over the course of the next six years and the Democrats want government spending to increase by 20 percent over the next six years. So from the head of the Republican Party, we had a proud confession that Republicans want more government. Once again, the two most obvious solutions are to either cut benefits or you increase taxes, and I don't think the Republicans and Democrats really have the nerve to substantially cut benefits and so therefore we get tax increases. And I'm not sure that the program isn't already a morally bankrupt program, if nothing else. It's not an insurance program. I think most people think it's insurance and by the definition of insurance, it's where you pay out money now and somebody saves it and earns money on it so that they can pay you the benefits at some point in the future. Someone I know went to the doctor recently and had quite a large doctor bill for a non-life-threatening problem and saw some people in the doctor's office who were really just in horrible shape, suffering tremendously and commented how sorry that this person felt for people who don't have insurance. The person who was in there getting medical care that I knew was on Medicare. My thought was, you don't have insurance either. What you've got is you've got the ability, you have first claim on the paychecks of all working Americans. And this person that I know certainly is in no position to be taking money from people who are working at $4 to $6 an hour, this person is pretty well-to-do. How can you get up and tell people that you want to get rid of Medicare whenever they think, gee, when I get to be 65, all my medical bills are going to be taken care of. And with Social Security, whenever I turn 62 or whatever, I'm going to start getting this monthly paycheck.

They're terrific government programs, they have great benefits but somebody's got to pay for them. So we've set these programs up so a whole lot of people who are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves are now on a government program. People who are well-to-do are getting money from people who are earning $4-$6 an hour. Medicare should not be saved. Public assistance medical aid is Medicaid. Medicare is just for people over the age of 65, I think. So we've already split it up but we need to further. We need to take the Medicare part and define those people who are in need of public assistance and separate those from the people who are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. We need to begin to ease out of the program by finding out who really cannot take care of themselves and you would think that at 50 percent taxes, that after government provided the basic services of national defense, the branches of government, legislative, executive and judicial, that the very first thing that the government would do would be to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves even if they wanted to. But yet, this is not what is happening. Why is it that Jerry Lewis has to get up on television every year and beg for money from people who could not take care of themselves if they wanted to. Because we have not thought the issue out. We have not addressed the fact that half of our income is going to the government and that the government is not even taking care of people who cannot take of themselves and that the solution to Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, the great entitlements is that we must think out a logical solution. Politicians must go to the American people and say that there are a lot of people out there that don't need to be on a government program, but if we're going to take your money from you, let's at least recognize that we're stealing the money. Really we're taking your money from you against your will. People are not paying taxes voluntarily, they're doing it under duress. At least, let's use the Robin Hood theory of stealing that if you're going to take money from people, take it from the truly wealthy and give it to the people who are truly needy.

5. What is the most important issue facing 8th District residents?

Tlapek: Taxation. People have had it with taxes and somebody hasn't gotten the message. My impression is that people have had it with taxes but the politicians are continuing to promise more benefits to people and that's the only way that we can deliver more benefits. They're refusing to address the issue of the fact that they can't keep doing that. They're promising more benefits to people but they're not allowing for the fact that in order to deliver these benefits we're going to have to raise taxes. And they do it very well, I'll grant them that. They're very clever about getting our money from us. People I really do think have had it with taxation and that is what people want to do something about.

People say that if you are not willing to vote, don't complain. I say if you are not willing to vote Libertarian don't complain about paying taxes because we're the best-known party that gets up there and says that the government does not have a right to take your money from you. The politicians should have to earn money for worthy public works projects like everybody else does by asking for it. The other issue that I think is most pressing on people's minds is this issue of morality. People truly believe that this ship is sunk not because of fiscal irresponsibility but because of the fact that we have lost our morality as a nation, that kids are totally amoral. Well, in the United States, the government is our moral authority and the government is earning its living dishonestly. It's getting its income by taking it from people against their will. So what do you expect of the people in a country where the moral authority gets its living dishonestly. We are morally opposed to taxes. We do not think that anyone has the right to take your money from you, no matter how good their cause. We prefer that people who use government services pay for them. We call those user fees and as an example, I would cite what I think is the best case example and that is the gasoline tax -- the amount of government service that you use is directly related to the amount that you pay.

6. Do you support the nation's open trade policy?

Tlapek: Do we have an open trade policy? I think that government feels that they have the right to control everything we do, what we drink, what we smoke, what kind of sex we have, where we send our kids to school, who we trade with. There is not a single aspect of our daily lives that the government does not feel it has a right to be involved with. So the government passes judgment on each and every trade decision that we make. The Food and Drug Administration is costing a lot of lives every year because they feel the need to get into this decision between a producer of a product and a consumer of a product and interfere with that free-trade decision. It's costing a lot of lives, perhaps more lives than anything else in this country right now. So Libertarians are very much proponents of the free market. It is obvious that the whole world seeks to emulate the success which we have attained by whatever free market we have had and still have left. The world is moving towards a free market at the same time as we are moving away from it.

7. Do you support the current farm bill?

Tlapek: I was frankly, kind of pleasantly surprised at the Freedom to Farm Act. It seems, if I read about it right, to me an attempt to phase out government subsidies in farming. Amen, Hallelujah. But it allows them seven years to do it and I have very little faith in government that at the end of three or four years that they won't be back promising farmers benefits.

8. Do you favor term limits for federal lawmakers?

Tlapek: I generally haven't in the past, but I'm almost ready to give in on this issue because I think that might be a very effective way of changing the system very quickly, to phase out politicians. You know it's a really hard job being a politician. It's no coincidence that the really good politicians don't say anything when they talk because that's the true art of being a politician, it is how to move your lips and not say anything. They're few and far between, truly good politicians. So if we do impose term limits, we're going to run out of a supply of really good politicians, which means that some people who don't know how not to talk and not say anything are going to end up in political office and they'll have to address the issues.

9. Do you support making English the official language of the federal government?

Tlapek: No. I presume the government is not going to start writing the laws in Albanian. To me it seems to fall in the category of the bloody obvious: yes, we speak English in this country and that everything the government does is done in English. I don't really have a problem if there is a large population of Spanish-speaking Americans in some county in southern Texas or southern California; so there's a sign that's in Spanish and English. I just can't get too upset about that.

10. Do you support managed health care? Should the federal government have a role in it? If so, what?

Tlapek: If managed health care is a euphemism for socialized medicine, then no, I'm not in favor of it. I think that the best management is the one that's closest to the person being managed, let people manage their own health care needs. And the one problem -- the reason that health care is so expensive, and insurance companies are beginning to realize this -- when you have health care policies that make you pay a part of your health insurance, of your medical treatment, then they are realizing if you don't recognize that this service costs you anything then you have absolutely zero motivation whatsoever to control the costs involved in it. So I think we're headed that way.

And once again, this is a place where Libertarians offer some fairly unique solutions. The government already has much too large a role in health care. Medicine is a supply/demand situation like everything else in that the demand is insatiable and that the government has unnecessarily limited the supply of medicine by forcing people to become licensed by the government to practice medicine and that we could begin to expand the availability of medical care to poorer people by allowing pharmacists to prescribe medication, (and encouraging) midwifery; it doesn't take 25 years of college education to sew up a cut. If your kid cuts himself, gets a gash on his forehead on the playground, you don't need 25 years of education to sew up that cut. (It would) increase availability of medical care, reduce the cost by reducing the government-granted monopoly on medical care.

11. Do you support collective bargaining for public employees?

Tlapek: Yes, I do. It is the job of every employer to pay their employee as little as possible. Conversely, it is the job of every employee to get as much as possible out of their employer. If employees can achieve their goals of getting the most for their labor that they can by collective bargaining, I am all for it, and government employees are no exception. Yes, absolutely (they should have the right to strike).

12. Do you support school choice and a voucher system for public schools?

Tlapek: Yes. That's the whole idea of the Libertarian Party, to increase individual choice. So we are all for anything that's going to increase individual choice. I'm most excited about education because I think that if we've learned anything from alcohol and drug prohibition, it is that you cannot keep from people that which they want to have. And the kids want an education, they want to learn and we really can't screw this up. Technology is increasing educational opportunities. It's no coincidence that kids come into the first grade already knowing how to read now because they saw it on TV and there are people who have a commercial interest in getting your kid to learn. And that's kind of what the free market is all about. Anytime you give somebody a financial incentive to produce a desired result, you're much more likely to achieve that desired result. And not only should we give teachers a financial incentive to achieve that desired result of a well-educated child, but we should allow anybody else who has a financial interest in educating children, have a crack at it also.

13. Would you vote to extend the Brady Bill's five-day waiting period for purchasing guns?

Tlapek: No. The Brady bill is a form of gun control. It is an attempt to keep people who shouldn't have guns from getting guns and I applaud the sentiment of that like I applaud most every government program that ever came down the pike. Every piece of legislation, every government agency, every government department is created with the best of intentions, I've no doubt. But the undeniable truth is that we can never keep guns out of the hands of bad people and as an analogy, I would ask people to consider the fact that because one or two people in the class have acted up, the whole class is being punished. And that authoritarian mentality of government is what we really need to address.

14. Why should someone vote for you for Congress?

Tlapek: Because they've had it with taxes. Because they know that a vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate says you're doing a great job, keep up the work and they're not. Although they mean well, there is no difference. Republicans and Democrats are content to continue to spend more and more money until we stop them. The best way to stop government growth is to send a message that if they can't do it, we'll find somebody else who can. The Libertarians offer a logical, humane solution to the problem of taxation.

TODAY'S PROFILE: GREG TLAPEK

Age: 39

Residence: Cape Girardeau

Education: Graduate of Cape Central High School, attended University of Missouri-Columbia

Occupation: Cape girardeau County Libertarian Party chairman.

Political: His first political race was two years ago in 8th Congressional District.