Sean Bielat for Congress Massachusetts CD 4

Meet Sean Bielat. He's a former active duty Marine officer, and served 7 years in the Marine reserves with the rank of Major. He has an MA in public policy from Harvard. And he's currently an IT consultant. From his Bio:

Sean, 34, and his wife are residents of Brookline, MA where they are expecting their first child in August. They are members of St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church in Brookline. Sean currently works as an independent consultant. Until recently, Sean worked at iRobot Corporation where he ran the company's largest defense robotics program. Prior to that, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.

And like many in the IT field, Bielat holds very libertarian views on the issues of the day.

Jobs

Stimulus spending has put politics over policy, and the result has been handouts to special interests, inefficient spending, and far too much debt.

It is clear that real economic growth comes from businesses working to compete and grow in the free market. Government cannot create jobs (aside from government jobs); only business can create jobs and sustainable economic growth.

Taxes

We need a tax code that doesn’t penalize success but also doesn’t punish the working poor. Some emerging democracies have learned lessons from the failed tax systems of other nations. These countries have had great success with a system in which an individual pays no income tax on earnings up to the poverty line and pays only a relatively low flat tax above that level.

Spending

President Obama’s proposal to cut non-defense, discretionary spending by 10% is a meaningless gesture—it would only apply to 12% of the total federal budget, meaning that there would be only a 1.2% cut in total spending over a 10-year period. This “cut” will have no real impact and serves only to provide the appearance of action.

Cutting earmarks and wasteful spending are obvious solutions and a good start.

National Security

American military might keeps the peace. Some on the left fixate on the exceptions to this statement, but the period of American pre-eminence has had fewer major conflicts than any other period since the rise of nation-states. U.S. strength creates stability across the globe... Many people believe that we should focus on non-state actors (i.e., terrorists, jihadists, etc.) rather than nation-states. I believe that we can, and must, do both.

With great power comes great responsibility. As the world’s sole superpower, we must be slow to undertake military action. We must only employ our military might when it is clearly in the national interest to do so.

Our founding fathers wisely gave the power to declare war to the representatives of the people; if the people do not believe that a conflict is in their national interest, then it is not. We should adhere to the Constitution and only fight in conflicts that receive a majority vote in Congress via a Declaration of War.

A Republican Against the War on Drugs

While all the above issue stances fall comfortably within the mainstream Republican view, Beilat takes a differeing approach on the War on Drugs. In a recent interview with Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim, Beilat said the following:

"I'm a conservative, but I would say on drug issues I tend toward libertarian," he says, arguing that the war on drugs has been a total failure and that policy should focus on reducing the harm associated with drugs.

It makes no sense, he says, that coffee and alcohol are legal when other drugs aren't.

"Barney's not bad on those issues," offers Bielat, saying he won't make it part of his campaign. "I don't need to beat my head against that particular wall."

Barney can be Beat

The Republican adds, Barney's no friend of freedom on taxes and spending:

"I'm not emphasizing social issues. I'm here to talk about economic issues. That's what people care about this year," he says. "He's hardly libertarian on economic issues, though. I'm going to be talking about the deficit; I'm going to be talking about job creation; I'm going to be talking about economic growth; I'm going to be talking about taxes."

Bielat's cautiously optimistic of his chances:

"I think he's going to be arrogant about this. I don't think he's going to pay attention. And I don't want him to," he says.

"If we can't do it this year, this guy's going to be in there till he retires."

SeanBielat.org