Rick Stewart

Rick Stewart was born in Postville, Iowa. Stewart graduated from Phillips Academy in 1969. He earned an associate degree in agricultural mechanics from Kirkwood Community College, a bachelor's degree from Coe College in 1991 and a master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1993. Stewart's career experience includes working as the CEO of Frontier Natural Products Co-Operative and as a law enforcement officer in Maquoketa, Iowa. He has been affiliated with EDELAC in Xela, Guatemala and Quetzaltrekkers in Xela, Guatemala.[1][2]

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Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I'm a well educated Iowa native who still lives here because it is the best state in the Union in the best country in the world. I could be wrong on that, but I've visited perhaps half of those countries and never found one I like more than the United States, Iowa specifically. I might trade Paris for Texas or California.

A vote for me is a a vote for thinking outside the box (but to sure to vote inside the box on your ballot).

"In all that I do, at all times and with all people, I conduct my affairs and the affairs of my office with unwavering integrity. " If you're like me - vote for me! Others need not apply.

I want to end the Drug War, America's greatest mistake and tragedy. Today, not when my grandchildren are grandparents.

I want to eliminate crony capitalism, so we can enjoy all the benefits of the free market, with none of the corruption that comes from politicians with their hands in our pockets and their thoughts on that fat lobbying job they plan to take when they 'retire'.

I want to take a close look at our foreign policy and ask ourselves an easy question - why do so many countries around the world hate us? Could it be we are bad neighbors?

I want a tax system that gives us a reason to be joyful when we pay our taxes. And a system that gives us joy when we look at the way the politicians spend our money.

I want to live in a country where we are all free to do as we please, so long as we don't use force to get our way.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

Let's end the Drug War. Treat our neighbors as human beings to be loved, not criminals to lock up in cages.Taxes should be efficient, effective, and enjoyable to pay. There goes the income tax ...The best government is limited government, which will give us fewer things to be afraid of, to hate our neighbor because of, and to argue with our family about when we aren't arguing about religion.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

Ending the Drug War.

Allowing our veterans access to the best PTSD treatment in the history of the world - MDMA assisted therapy.

Doing a good job of helping the bottom 5%, rather than pretending to help everybody while actually helping nobody. The top 95% can be responsible for themselves and don't need to look to Washington or Des Moines for help.

Trying to soak the rich never works, because they have the money to hire lawyers and lobbyists to soak us instead. Treat them with kindness and and you will discover just how generous they are, and how little you need their help to make this world a wonderful place for 100% of us.

Can we have some peace already? Being a bad neighbor doesn't make the rest of the world fond of us. Rethink our militaristic tendencies, and give peace a chance.

My town can solve our own problems if we don't have to send 25% of our income to Washington politicians. Think local!

If we don't have anything good to say, let's not say anything at all. It worked in my family cuz, you know, my dad made sure it did.

Let's do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Just because that is 2,000 year old advice doesn't make it bad advice!

If our neighbor has a Drug Use Disorder (DUD), let's help him deal with it. And not by locking him up in a rape cage, DUH.

Let's have more than Republicans and Democrats! They haven't done such a great job for this country, so let's give a third or fourth or fifth party a shot at it.

What characteristics or principles are most important for an elected official?

"In all that I do, at all times and with all people, I will conduct my affairs and the affairs of my office with unwavering integrity."

I wrote that 35 years ago and I ferociously adhere to it.

Work every day to give everyone you represent the opportunity to pursue, in their own way, the American Dream.

Educate yourself. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is the place to start. After that, read Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. When you are finished, your term will be up and you should hand off the baton to the public servant who replaces you.

What legacy would you like to leave?

On my tombstone - Here lies the man who ended the War on Drug

What was your very first job? How long did you have it?

In fourth grade I became a paper boy for the Des Moines Register, a job I continued for five years. Thanks to this I received a scholarship to attend Phillips Academy in Andover MA, the best high school in the world, for high school. I misbehaved a bit, but did graduate on time with a fantastic education.

What is your favorite book? Why?

Ulysses, by James Joyce. It consumed my entire 30 day visa in Thailand. When I finished the last sentence, I wanted to start rereading it, but I had to move on to Laos. Understanding every word of it was the greatest intellectual challenge of my life.

A governor is the top executive authority in his or her state. What does that mean do you?

It is the Governor's job to represent all 3.15 million Iowans equally. This means being a consensus builder, not a division creator.

The goal of every Governor should be to veto any legislative action which does not have the unanimous support of every legislator. Exceptions can be made for legislators whose only objective is to create division for personal political gain.

Governors have many responsibilities, which vary from state to state. Which of those do you personally consider the most important in your state?

Fiscal responsibility is foremost. This means keeping taxes as low as possible, to allow individual citizens of the state to keep as much of their money as possible, to be spent and invested as they see fit, given their own interpretation of the meaning of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Iowa Constitution also requires the state to educate its citizens. This requires setting realistic goals and relentlessly pursuing those goals in the most cost effective manner possible. After success, raise the goals.

The Governor also oversees the Iowa justice system, to ensure equal justice for all, so individual Iowans can rest assured they do not have to hire a private army to protect their body and property.

What do you believe is the ideal relationship between the governor and state legislature?

The Governor is the CEO. The legislature is the Management Team. They work together to achieve the best possible outcome for all 3.15 million Iowans, using a consensus decision making process.

Campaign website

Stewart's campaign website stated the following:

2nd Amendment

I Own, I Shoot, I Carry.

I own, I shoot, I carry.

Any questions?

Clean Iowa

Does Iowa Need To Clean Up Its Act?

Iowa is one of the largest polluters in the world. We take the clean water we are blessed with from above, and turn it into toxic waste. Toxic for everything except the algae in the Gulf of Mexico, which eat it and thrive, but have turned 6,334 square miles of pristine water into an international dead zone.

That’s 11% the size of our beautiful state. Draw a straight line from my home town of Postville to my great-great grandfather’s home town of Keokuk. Imagine all of Iowa to the right of it suitable for nothing but slimy green algae. That’s the area Iowa’s pollution has destroyed in the Gulf of Mexico.

We can do better.

Des Moines politicians appear to be antagonistic toward possible solutions, preferring to argue about who should pay for it, which always comes down to which taxpayers will pay, yours or mine.

With pollution there is always a simple principle – the people who pollute should stop polluting, or pay for it. I learned that in Econ 101.

As with the entire world, Iowa is composed of watersheds. A watershed is the land upon which a single drop of rain will always run toward the same river. There are 27 of them in Iowa.

Every piece of land in a watershed is a potential polluter. Either the water that flows off it is as clean as the water that flowed onto it, or the land owner is a polluter.

Iowa can create co-ops in each watershed, with each land owner a member, and give the co-ops a simple directive. The water flowing out of the watershed (usually the mouth of a river) must be as clean as the water flowing into it. This is easy to measure – water quality meters are very inexpensive, and can be monitored remotely. Imagine a single computer screen with up to the minute data from 27 co-ops. A positive number means a watershed is polluting, a negative number means they are actually making their water cleaner (cleaning up water that doesn’t come from rain, but from Minnesota).

Now it becomes the job of each co-op’s land owners to figure out how to make it happen. Iowa only cares about the results, not about the methods used to achieve them. This may sound complicated, but I trust 27 co-ops to develop the most efficient and cost effective method of achieving their goal. Watershed co-ops will learn from each other, and co-op members will insist their co-op is at least as efficient and cost-effective as the best of them.

People solving problems, not politicians creating them. It’s a simple libertarian solution for making Iowa a state we can all be proud to live in.

Education

Children Learn Best When They Have Great Teachers

Although it is missing from the US Constitution (one of the reasons I am in favor of completely eliminating the US Department of Education), Iowa’s Constitution specifically makes education an obligation of the State.

“The educational interest of the state, including common schools and other educational institutions, shall be under the management of a board of education.”

Seven years later the board of education was abolished, to be replaced by Title VII of the Iowa Code and its 50 chapters.

Iowa legislators like to joke, “The state only does three things – educate, medicate, and incarcerate.”

Based on the respective budgets, that joke is not far off the mark.

The pure libertarian position is easy – the government has no business in the schooling business and should get out of it entirely, to allow the flourishing of the private market, freedom for its participants, and the elimination of discontent. One only has to look at the history of educational achievement around the country, and in Iowa, to recognize neither the Federal nor the State government is getting ‘A’ grades.

But we are where we are.

In Iowa we have many fine public schools. I attended them and loved every minute of it. My teachers may have their own opinions.

My own children attended Iowa public schools, and they seem to have survived.

One of my children actually attended an elite (and expensive) private high school in Massachusetts, the same one I attended 25 years before her. Thanks to the scholarships I received (from the good fortune of being a Des Moines Register paper boy), and to the financial sacrifices of my parents, followed by my own, both my daughter and I seem to have received a good high school education, perhaps even a superb one.

Most of my grandchildren have also attended public schools. The results vary, but I am eternally optimistic. Two of them attended private elementary schools in Cedar Rapids, at great sacrifice by their parents, before switching to public middle and high schools.

In addition my father was a public high school teacher in Iowa. So was my sister. And my brother was the head librarian (not libertarian) for a state university.

So the question for me is not ‘are Iowa public schools doing the job they have set out for themselves’, nor is it ‘are private schools better than public schools, or vice versa’.

The question for me is – can we do better?

I think we can.

What I do not think is, all we need to do is spend more money.

I think there is a lack of proper incentives, and a lack of competition.

The only things a school teacher should be incentivized by are 1) becoming a great teacher, and 2) being paid enough to discourage job shopping. Isn’t this the truth for all of us? We want to be great at our jobs, and we want to be paid enough that we aren’t interested in finding a different job. In short, we want personal fulfillment, and to be adequately compensated for our labor.

The research with which I am familiar says one thing – good teachers are the key to good education. Good teachers produce good results because, well, they love to teach and they have learned how to do it well.

Unfortunately it is not so easy to figure out who are the good teachers and who are the not quite so good teachers. Many methods have been tried, many have failed. I maintain the best method to determine whether teachers are successful is to let the parents decide (with the help of their own children, of course).

The best way to do this is to give parents the choice of who will teach their children. If a teacher attracts many students, let’s believe the parents. If a teacher attracts very few students … let’s believe the parents. This is called a free market, and it works in every other aspect of life. People vote with their dollars, so when quality is high and price is low, businesses thrive. It can work with teachers, too.

Before moving on, a gentle reminder. Wealthy parents already have their choice of teachers. I literally bought my daughter the best teachers I could find! The challenge doesn’t have to be solved for wealthy parents, it only needs to be solved for the rest of us.

The question is – how will relatively not so well off parents be able to afford anything but the teachers no one else wants?

I am open to discussion, but at this point I haven’t seen anything better than letting the taxpayers’ money follow the child (it’s not the government’s money, let’s never forget that). Taxpayers spend an enormous amount of money educating children, and it is always expressed as the ‘annual per pupil cost’. Why shouldn’t the money follow the children around, so parents can find the best teachers for their kids, and afford to pay them?

Well, some legislators are not open to the idea of competition. They prefer a monopoly and public schools are a monopoly, or are as good as a monopoly, when you don’t have $10,000 for each of your children every year to hire the best teachers for them, if they happen to be teaching in a private school.

One doesn’t have to ‘believe’ in great public schools, or even greater private schools, to recognize if the money follows the child, no matter where the parents decide to send the child, great teachers will have an advantage, and we will soon learn who the great teachers are, because they will be the ones with a gaggle of kids trailing behind them, wherever they teach, public or private.

As I said, I’m always open to discussion. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe you are right, but we’ll never ever know, if all we do is fight.

Eminent Domain

No Private Gain From Public Pain

The Iowa Constitution gives the state the right to take private property for public use, with just compensation. It does not authorize the taking of private property for private use, and this should not be allowed.

A CO2 pipeline built by a private company, with the sons of three former governors (Branstad, Vilsack, Culver) and a former President of the Iowa Board of Regents (Rastetter) as investors, raises a peculiar odor long before the first shovel hits the dirt. That odor does not pass my sniff test.

There is a country where the state can take your land, give it to somebody else, and you have no power to stop them. That country is not America.

End the Drug War

America's Second Civil War Needs To End

Everyone who knows me knows my opinion on the Drug War – it is the biggest mistake America has ever made. Drug use is not drug abuse, and most drug users harm no one, including themselves. Threatening them with prison has no persuasive moral basis and violates the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, and the Iowa Constitution.

Let’s not pretend drug abuse does not exist, however. Some people manage to take too many drugs, in the process hurting both themselves and the people around them. Sugar is the biggest culprit, as skyrocketing cases of diabetes and obesity clearly show us. Tobacco and alcohol are in a close race for second place. These three drugs produce more negative health outcomes than anything else, yet we have learned to live with them, and expect individuals to accept personal responsibility for consuming them in excess.

We should do the same for all the drugs that are currently illegal.

Let’s not be sanguine, however, about the potential harm of consuming too much marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin or various other drugs. Rather let us provide people with accurate information, unbiased by political and marketing opinions, as to the potential dangers of excessive drug use, as well as how to use drugs in the safest manner possible.

In particular we want to encourage abstinence in young people, who are not yet fully responsible for their own behavior. Again, threatening them with prison has no persuasive moral basis, and arresting their parents is equally abhorrent. Imagine a parent who allows their child to consume too much sugar, turning them obese before they reach puberty. Would you throw the parent in prison? The child? Both?

I would prefer not to.

Drug Warriors are clearly losing their Drug War, for obvious reasons. It’s time to call for an unconditional surrender, while giving them full credit for good intentions. We don’t want people to suffer from their own actions, but we must protect their unalienable right to pursue their own definition of happiness.

Let’s just make sure their choices are informed choices, uninfluenced by people who would like to profit from selling poisons like sugar, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, etc.

Always remember – the dose makes the poison.

Ethanol

Ethanol May Be A Good Idea. And It May Not Be.

Ethanol may be a good idea. And it may not be.

The last place I would look for an intelligent attitude on ethanol is government, state or federal. I read nothing in either the American or the Iowa Constitution suggesting government should have anything at all to do with energy, and our founders got it right.

Let me suggest the free market is the best allocator of goods and services in an economy. When suppliers and consumers of energy meet in a free market, prices and quantities are determined by supply and demand. This arrangement gave America the greatest economy in the history of the world, and it still performs for us on a daily basis.

Most unfortunately, state and national politicians have caved in to special interest lobbies, lobbies that are not working for the common good, but for private gain. By simply eliminating all subsidies and regulations for energy producers (and consumers) of every stripe and style, the marketplace will quickly determine how much ethanol will be produced and what price consumers will have to pay for it. There is no way the government can make that allocation better.

But what about pollution, I hear a voice in the back of the room ask.

You are correct – pollution is an externality producers do not have to take into their financial considerations, because the negative effects land on others.

The correct way to deal with an externality is to either make it easy for the people who are negatively impacted to sue for damages in a civil court, or to tax it. That’s why class action suits are allowed, and that’s why a carbon tax is the most efficient and effective way to reduce carbon emissions. If you don’t believe me, there’s a Nobel Prize winner you can talk to.

Government should never pick winners and losers, it should remain neutral. To do otherwise creates economic distortions that profit a few, but hurt everyone else.

Ethanol is no exception.

Local control of local issues

Centralized Government Leads To Less Customer Satisfaction And Sometimes It Leads To Tyranny, As With Vladimir Putin

Centralized government likes to collect power in a centralized point, as Washington DC and Des Moines demonstrate every day. For good reasons, explained by many thoughtful economists and political scientists, libertarians prefer decentralization.

The recent Covid experience is a case in point. Washington wanted to take full control, and repeatedly demonstrated the deficiencies of that approach. Iowa is neither California nor New York, but Washington couldn’t resist telling us every rule should be applied to everyone in the country. As we learned, Washington does not even have the authority, either from our Constitution or from the myriad laws passed since 1788, to do some of the things it wanted to do.

Governors had 50 different ideas. Some were probably good ideas, some were obviously bad ideas, but we were 50 laboratories of experimentation. Common sense and basic arithmetic tells us 50 people working independently on a problem will come up 98% of the time with better solutions than if only 1 person is working on it. It’s called competition, and over the course of time the best ideas will rise to the top and be copied, the bad ideas will disappear.

The same principle applies within Iowa. The solution for my city, Cedar Rapids, is unlikely to be the best solution for my birth town, Postville, or my hometown of Maquoketa.

The idea a legislature in Des Moines will always know what is best for every town and county in Iowa is simply not a credible claim. People who live in Council Bluffs might have a preference for muffins, while people in Dubuque prefer bagels. People in Pella might prefer quiet Sundays, but people in Iowa City might not.

This is why a decentralized approach produces better results. People can make decisions in small groups (towns, cities, counties), and will be happier with them, even if the decisions they reach differ from group to group.

Additionally, people are always physically closer to their local officials than to their state representatives. You might not know your mayor personally, but you only have to drive across town to tell him what’s on your mind. It’s a lot easier than driving to Des Moines, and there’s a much better chance you will actually meet your mayor in person and give her a piece of jawboning.

With very few exceptions the Iowa legislature should not be making laws that apply to everyone in the state, unless it is mandated by the Iowa Constitution. This would include mask mandates, and non-mandate mandates (as in school boards cannot have mask mandates). In my reading of the Iowa Constitution the only thing the state is required to do is provide a court system, a militia, and public education. Everything else should be left to counties and towns.

As clunky as it is, the Iowa Constitution is a very libertarian document and reflects the thoughts of founders who wanted as little government as possible, and as much personal freedom as possible.

Our liberties we prize, and our rights we will maintain

This is best provided by a state that allows local control of local issues.

Mental Health

Everyone Needs Good Mental Health, Why Don't We Have It?

I have personal experience with mental health care in Iowa as my son suffered an acute psychotic episode in the summer of 2017, the one I call my summer of fire and brimstone. Being retired and available I walked him through a 3 day commitment at Mercy Hospital in Cedar Rapids, a 10 day commitment at the University of Iowa hospitals, a homeless shelter, a halfway house, and a one year interlude before returning to work. The good news is he has experienced no repetition of the problem and continues to be a productive citizen. And – he had insurance.

In a nutshell, in Iowa we only have two paths for people suffering acute mental health problems – inpatient hospital care, and prison. There are only about 700 inpatient psychiatric beds in the state, they cost between $3,000 and $5,000 per day, and no one I know believes prisons are designed to provide mental health care services.

I believe every county in Iowa needs 24/7 access to acute mental health care services, and I do not believe money is the answer. Some people believe more money from taxpayers will solve every problem, I believe more money from taxpayers probably created these problems in the first place, because money from taxpayers always comes with strings, and regulations, and unintended consequences.

I believe deregulation of health care is the most effective and efficient way to move forward, and allowing trained professionals to prescribe psychotropic medicine would be a good first step in that direction. I have a great deal of confidence in the ability of Iowa’s trained professionals to serve their patients well, to serve them quickly, and to serve them cost-effectively.

Let’s let the private market do what it does best – compete on price, quality, and service.

Imagine waking up in the morning with a raging toothache and bleeding gums. Imagine calling your dentist and hearing ‘I have an opening for you in six months’. That would be a broken dental care system.

Instead, your dentist will manage to squeeze you in to an already busy day, and give you exactly the dental care you need. We should expect the same service from Iowa’s mental health care system.

National Guard

The Iowa National Guard Has A Proud History Dating Back To 1838

The Iowa National Guard has a proud history dating back to 1838, and has served this state well. In times of emergency we have all benefited from its services.

Unfortunately, the Guard was also forced to serve our nation poorly in the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, although these were never wars, they were AUMFs (authorization for use of military force).

As Governor I will not allow Iowa National Guard troops to be deployed overseas unless Congress passes an actual declaration of war. This would have directly saved 95 Iowa lives and allowed thousands of Guardswo/men to continue their Iowa lives without the massive interruption of being sent to an overseas war, when there was no war, only death and destruction.

If they do have to fight a war, I have no doubt our Iowa National Guard will be filled with proud and capable soldiers, leading the charge to save our democracy from foreign invaders. Lives will be lost, but freedom will be won.

I will also not allow the Iowa National Guard to participate in the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is a war against American citizens, and that is not what Iowa soldiers have volunteered to do.

Obscene books

The idea of parents suing school teachers for exposing their children to books the parents don’t like perplexes me. Why don’t the parents just move their child to a different teacher, or to a different school, that will only expose their children to the books the parents approve of?

After all, if the parents of all the other children in the room have no problem with the books, it should be an indicator that opinions differ. This situation arises frequently in our everyday lives, and we don’t have to settle our disputes with lawsuits. Think of movies, as an example. Parents can decide which movies are suitable for their children, and not take them to movies they disapprove of. The movies aren’t banned, they just attract a different set of viewers (and if there aren’t enough viewers, the movies disappear from the theaters, no lawsuits are needed).

If you read my ‘Education’ issue you will see my opinion that public schools, with their near monopoly position, are what cause the problem. Government itself has created the obscene books problem by imposing its good intentions on everyone, rather than letting every person be free to choose for themselves. The unintended consequence is that parents are fighting over books, rather than just choosing teachers with whom they agree.

A libertarian world truly is much simpler, and creates better results for everyone.

Occupational licensing

Occupational Licensing - Iowa Government Run Amok?

If you have to get a license from the state to make a living at a certain trade, that’s called occupational licensing. You will not find any mention of it in either the American or the Iowa Constitutions, but the custom extends far back in history, medieval guilds being the example most familiar to us.

Unfortunately there has been an explosion of occupational licensing laws, beginning in the late 20th century, and Iowa is one of the the worst offenders. You can see a list of all 111 occupations in Iowa requiring a license