The third-party presidential debate was refreshingly serious

Last night, three people who know they won’t be president but are running for office anyway took the stage in Los Angeles for a spirited third-party debate.

In the debate hosted by Free and Equal, Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver, Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Constitution Party Randal Terry discussed whether government should be much smaller, much bigger or reorient- is totally towards Judeo-Christian values. .

Being the ideological bigots that they are, all the third-party candidates made refreshingly undistilled cases for their contrasting views of government.

Oliver did an admirable job of laying out the fundamentals of libertarianism and then applying them to individual cases.

“If you are not harming other people with your behaviour, your behavior is perfectly acceptable and should not be regulated by the government or any other entity,” he said last night, arguing that we should scrap zoning laws to make housing affordable, cuts. spend, sell federal lands to reduce debt and stay out of foreign wars.

The other two candidates offered fresh perspectives that were at least interesting to hear, even if not necessarily advisable.

Terry argued that we should build a wall on the northern border to keep Canadians out, search for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to pay off the national debt, and eat raw broccoli to cure cancer.

Stein said building a wall on the southern border would not stop drugs from entering legal “gates of entry,” but would devastate wildlife and natural ecosystems along the US-Mexico border. . He also perceptively argued that we are stumbling into a wider war in the Middle East without any real recognition or discussion.

The fact that everyone on stage knew he wasn’t going to the White House opened up room for a productive deal, especially between Oliver and his two debate opponents.

The Libertarian candidate actively agreed with Stein that we should cut off foreign aid to Israel and nodded to Terry’s convulsive anti-property tax rants.

You’d think the allure of watching bigots say wild things in a debate format would be diminished in a day and age when Donald Trump (who skipped last night’s debate) is the Republican nominee.

Hardly Last night’s third-party debate managed to provide its own unique and refreshing brand of weirdness.

Whether it was the candidates offering unconventional diagnoses of generalized obesity, debate moderator Christina Tobin riffed extensively on the power of music to heal psychological distress caused by “the system,” or even just the sheer frequency of the musical guests (there was a musical break about every five minutes towards the end), the debate was so deliciously weird.

With all that being said, there were a lot of boring, awful, and bogus main ideas that were thrown around as well.

Stein repeatedly argued that we could balance the federal budget by taxing the rich, cutting military spending, and passing Medicare for all. He called for emergency rent control and vacancy taxes to reduce housing costs. He said we could end mass illegal immigration by lifting sanctions on the socialist economies of Venezuela and Cuba.

Besides being wrong, these ideas are nothing you wouldn’t expect to hear from a progressive Democrat (or, in the case of rent control and debt reduction fantasies, a mainstream Democrat running for president) .

Similarly, Terry dusted off Mitt Romney’s old idea that millions of illegal immigrants could be “self-deported” if we made their lives miserable enough. His final statement also ended with a call for the total destruction of the Democratic Party. One wonders why he doesn’t just run as a Republican if he thinks one of the two major parties is so evil.

The upside of Terry and Stein referencing Republican and Democratic talking points is that it reinforced the idea that the Libertarian Party is the only true third. Oliver did not represent a more extreme version of either major party. It presented a unique message and a unique vision of government. It’s a shame that the more mainstream audience probably won’t hear it.