Resident running for Congressional seat
By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
It is a peaceful glen that calls Patrick McKnight at dusk.
On Hollow Road coming off Sourland Mountain, where the road flattens out and Rock Brook gurgles nearby, Mr. McKnight returns after a 12-hour day of work as a landscaper to tend to a garden and milk two goats on the 12-acre property that next year will have been in the family 100 years.
This is at the crossroads of the American Revolution, said the 27-year-old Libertarian Party candidate for Congress in the 7th District. On this very property, you could have heard the cannons from the Battle of Princeton. A couple of miles from here, (Declaration of Independence signer) John Hart hid from the Hessians.
He says he appreciates the serenity of the home of his grandparents, Ernest and Beverly Weidl. Mr. McKnights parents, John and Sharon, live at the top of the ridge, and Mr. McKnight lives nearby, on Zion Road in Hillsborough.
”It would be an honor and privilege to represent the cause of freedom right here at the crossroads of the American Revolution. I feel it’s the least I can do,” he said.
At the heart of his campaign for Congress is his belief America is threatened by an economic system on the verge of collapse, by laws that invade personal freedom and by inserting itself in wars abroad.
His ideas are endorsed by Congressman Ron Paul, a Libertarian turned Republican who excites a certain percentage of young and old with his mix of calls for lower taxes, deregulation of marijuana, retreat from militarism and a return to the rule of law as the nation’s Founding Fathers envisioned.
Mr. McKnight probably won’t make it to Congress, he has to know. He may raise and spend a total of $5,000 in his campaign, mostly on literature and lawn signs. His opponents, Democrat Upendra Chivikula and incumbent Republican Leonard Lance, will pour millions into media and organizing.
In comparison, Mr. McKnight will knock on doors on weekends and spend a few hours late each night stimulating an Internet campaign.
He would relish the opportunity to debate his opponents, with most of his fire reserved for Mr. Lance, he said. He particularly would ask him why he voted to take away people’s personal liberties by voting for the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, both laws that give the federal government the power to strip constitutional rights, he said.
Mr. McKnight said he doesn’t know much about Mr. Chivikula, except he supports energy subsidies, and “I don’t want government to go anywhere near there,” he said. The best thing government can do for clean energy industries is to leave them alone and let the market work, he said.
”When I talk to people about career politicians who have run our country into the ground, I have yet to find anyone who disagrees with me on that,” Mr. McKnight said.
A philosophy and sociology major in college, he said he was stimulated by the individualistic philosophy of Ayn Rand and then David Hume. These days, after chopping firewood, collecting eggs and taking the occasional swim in Rock Brook, he studies economics voraciously and plays in an alternative rock band that has recorded three albums at an Amwell Road studio and gotten air time on college stations, he said.
A sticker with the band’s name, Dinosaur Eyelids, shares space on the rear bumper of his car with one that urges “Less government, more freedom.” He ties them together.
”If you close your eyes to reality, you are hastening your own extinction,” he said. “If the reality is that America is in deep trouble, then the country must wake up or hasten its demise.”
He admitted his campaign platform is dense and substantive, but minus buzz words and catch phrases.
”When I read the 10 planks to the average person, he or she will agree with seven or eight — a pretty darn good percentage,” he said.
”I think 75 percent of Americans are Libertarians, and they just don’t know it,” he said. “Libertarianism is social justice — you don’t put someone in jail unless they’ve injured someone or deprives them of their rights — and fiscal conservatism. You don’t spend money you don’t have.”
Among those planks:
• Ending wars, bringing troops home and using money to pay down the deficit. The common theme is to let people be more independent and make their own decisions on their welfare.
• Ending bailouts and letting banks fail in a free market.
• Ending the war on drugs, including legalizing marijuana.
• Make paying into Social Security optional. Let young people decide on their own if and how to save for retirement.
• Ending unconstitutional bureaucracies like the IRS, FEMA, Transportation Security and departments of housing, interior, education, energy and commerce. Of course, the health care law passed by the Democrats and President Obama would be eliminated, too.
• Label genetically modified foods and let consumers make the choice about the safety of food they put into their bodies.
• End trade agreements that subsidize the export of American manufacturing jobs.
• Pay down the debt. Use Europe’s precarious economic woes as a canary in the coal mine, he said. With a debt of $16 trillion, the country is living on borrowed time, he said. People have not experienced anarchy until they see the dollar collapse, he warned.
And the Libertarian chestnut of them all: ending the Federal Reserve System, where a privately owned bank sets interest rates, devalues our currency and manipulates prices in a free market. Artificial interest rates, such as those promised by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke with open-ended quantitative easing policies, encourage misallocations of capital and discourage saving, he said. Mr. McKnight supports issuing money backed by gold or silver.
The candidate was drawn to politics when he participated in February 2003 in a New York City street protest against the Iraq War and it didn’t even make the local news.
”I thought then, and I do now, that the war was an outrage and a giant waste of young service people and trillions of our dollars that we can’t afford,” he said.
The 2007 graduate of Montgomery High School went to Rutgers University, where he studied philosophy and sociology. In a year of teaching public high school social studies in Camden, he learned more than all college combined, he said.
That goes not only to the relevance of the curriculum — “I want to teach recent history. What happened 10 years ago is more important than what happened 10,000,” he said — but as a failed test case for the welfare state. The more welfare the state has expended, the more poverty stricken and desperate people have become, he said.
The country is on the same road, he said.