I believe in individual liberty, personal responsibility, and government that stays out of your life and your wallet.
A free market is not a program government runs. It is people left free to trade with each other, keep what they earn, and build what they want to build.
The only proper role of government in the economy is to protect property rights and enforce against force and fraud. Everything past that does more harm than the problem it claims to fix.
Real prosperity grows from free individuals and strong families making their own choices in their own communities, not from distant central planners.
What that means in LaGrange County
Lower property taxes
A property tax means you never finish paying for land and a home you already bought. You rent it from the county, forever, and the rent keeps going up.
I will work to lower the county tax levy, starting with relief on primary residences, so families and farms are not taxed out of what they built.
Government does not pick winners
I oppose subsidies, bailouts, and handouts to business, including tax deals cut to lure in outside corporations like data centers.
If a business cannot make it on its own merits in LaGrange County, your tax dollars should not be used to prop it up while local shops and farms pay full freight.
Cut the burden on family farms and small business
Fees, levies, and layers of cost fall hardest on the people with the least margin to absorb them. Family farms are the backbone of this county.
Government should get out of their way, not charge them for the privilege of working their own land.
No carrot, no stick
State and federal grant money is not free. It comes with strings attached, and it bends local priorities toward whatever Indianapolis or Washington wants bought.
I would rather see this county budget honestly from its own revenues than chase handouts that leave us answering to someone else.
What I will do on the Council
The County Council is the county’s fiscal body. It holds the purse strings: budgets, appropriations, and the tax levy. That is where free market principles stop being talk:
- Vote against levy increases and push the levy down where the budget allows it
- Scrutinize spending line by line and cut what the county has no business funding
- Oppose appropriations for corporate handouts and for surveillance programs like Flock/ALPR
- Build voluntary funding mechanisms wherever the law allows, because funding by consent beats funding by force
Why this is personal
I started my own business after a bilateral disc herniation ended my previous work. No grant built that business and no program ran it for me. I adapted, got resourceful, and built it from the ground up.
I know what a tax bill and a stack of fees mean when money is tight, because I have lived it. I am running to move government out of the way for the next person trying to do the same.
Freedom works, if we let it.
No coercion. No extortion.