ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 13, 1996 TAG: 9610120005
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY AND MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITERS
IN Jay Rutledge's perfect world, cocaine would be for sale at the corner market and "immoral" government-run programs like Medicare would be abolished.
You wouldn't need a prescription to buy morphine, tranquilizers or antibiotics. You could walk in a drug store and order them by yourself.
The budget of the FBI would be slashed, and the federal police agency would be relegated to assisting local and state police. And, people could arm themselves with machine guns, free from federal controls or licensing requirements.
These unconventional views can be explained by Rutledge's party label. He's a Libertarian, one of more than 100 running in congressional elections across the country this year.
"Freedom" is his mantra, and Rutledge considers it the highest moral virtue. That means individuals are responsible for educating themselves and deciding what's right and wrong - as long as those decisions don't harm anyone else.
If that message doesn't play well to the public, Rutledge, 53, doesn't particularly care.
"I wouldn't make book on myself," the self-employed software developer from Southeast Roanoke admits. "One of the goals of this campaign is to acquaint the people with the Libertarian Party alternative. New Libertarians mean more to me than votes."
For instance, at a recent luncheon at Lewis-Gale Clinic in Salem, he called for the abolition of Medicare, the government-run health insurance for the elderly that hospital employees regard as sacred.
"Why would we want to save Medicare?" he asked in a tone more combative than that of the average politician. "The elderly pay over twice as much out of pocket for medical care now, adjusted for inflation, than they did before Medicare."
He also advocated many other controversial views, such as self-prescription of medications, abolishing the Food and Drug Administration and the legalizing of drugs such as heroin.
"It sounds like anarchy. Is he in a militia? I wanted to ask him that question so bad," Robin Barnhill, a computer systems administrator at the hopsital, said after the luncheon.
"There's got to be some kind of oversight," said Paula Mitchell, the hospital's vice president for behavioral health and rehabilitation. "We're not in a utopia. The only way to live as he prescribes is to live on an island somewhere."
Rutledge was born in Pueblo, Colo., and was raised in Tennessee and Northern Virginia. For most of his life he was a Democrat, although he voted for Ross Perot in 1992's presidential campaign.
He has a wide, "against the grain" streak that dates back to his days as a teen-ager in Annandale, and his experiences with what he sarcastically calls "the sophisticated culture of the Washington, D.C., beltway."
"In those days," Rutledge recalls, "there were atom bomb drills during which everyone went into the school hallways. I ridiculed these drills since anybody above ground within sight of D.C. would clearly not survive an atomic war. Those who agreed became my closest new friends."
He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina and a master's from the University of Virginia.
Rutledge was also an anti-draft, anti-war activist who protested the U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s, actions he recalls proudly as "a modest contribution ... to end the evil of conscription in America." He admits he smoked marijuana back then.
"And yes, I inhaled," he says.
The twice-divorced father of four worked for AT&T in Roanoke from 1971 until he was laid off in 1992. Since then, he's been self-employed and working out of his home.
Rutledge came to his Libertarian beliefs after reading "The Road to Serfdom," a book written by F.A. Hayeck, a Nobel laureate in economics.
"What connected with me was that Hayeck showed conclusively that freedom and planning by government cannot co-exist," Rutledge says. "It is in the nature of government planning to eventually extinguish human freedom."
One of the Libertarians' central themes is that "government doesn't work because it relies on coercion," Rutledge says.
"Libertarians want Americans to have the abundance of information for good decision-making in their own self-interest - which a free country has," he says. "The Libertarian philosophy is, `As long as you're not hurting someone or issuing threats or defrauding someone, you have the right to live your life free from the interference from government.'''
If he were in Congress, he'd cut defense spending by at least half and abolish a whole host of agencies such as the FDA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
"Most of the agencies and commissions in Washington are not authorized by the Constitution.
"If it is not authorized in the Constitution it does not belong in the federal government," Rutledge says. The Constitution "either means what it says or it has no meaning at all. Like any words, it will lose its meaning all together."
"The Libertarian philosophy is, `As long as you're not hurting someone or issuing threats or defrauding someone, you have the right to live your life free from the interference from government.'''
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