668: Stop the Empty Promises - Libertarian Ronald Tracy Robison's Plan for a Prosperous Jacksonville

Brian Nichols  0:17  
It's time to let the people be free. Yeah, let's talk about that. Instead of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Happy Thursday, Brian Nichols here on The Brian Nichols Show. And thank you for joining us on of course, another fun filled episode. I am as always your humble host joining us live from our Stratus ip Studios here in lovely Eastern Indiana. Don't let cyber attacks or outdated Business Technology put your company at risk. Learn more at the Brian Nichols show.com forward slash Stratus ip. Yes, it is time to in fact, let the people be free and what better way to do so than to have another Yes. Another Libertarian candidate. Yes. In fact running for city council down in Jacksonville, Florida. Joining us today on The Brian Nichols Show. Ron Tracy Robinson. Thank you for joining us on the program.

Ronald Tracy Robison  1:21  
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited. Ron,

Brian Nichols  1:24  
I'm so excited to have you on the show. Again, another city council candidate from Jacksonville with the big L next to their name. So I appreciate that. But yeah, that's right. We had Eric Parker here on the show back on Monday, Monday yesterday. Yeah, Monday. And we're having you here on the show today. Yeah, it's Jacksonville, Jacksonville City, Florida week, it seems like but you're one of our candidates here running others three candidates running for city council as libertarians. So you must complete the trifecta. But first before we go ahead and start talking about all things Jacksonville and libertarianism and messaging. Do us a favor, introduce yourself to The Brian Nichols Show audience and why are you running for office as one of the three libertarian candidates there in Jacksonville, Florida.

Ronald Tracy Robison  2:05  
My name is Ronald Tracy Robertson, I was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, all my life. I went to First Coast High School and graduated from there 2009, then I went straight into the workforce. Now I'm working for General Electric, and I am an inventory specialist. I've been there for about close to five years now. Now what inspired me to run for office was the fact that during COVID-19, and that time, me being an inventory specialist, I had a really kind of really good insight of how the government intervention into the free market affected the supply chain and how much of a bill and a deficit that it plunged us all all into. Because you know, in my job, we have a really big map of all the facilities that we have and all the you know the the product that's coming in and how much it costs for it to get there to the dock. So they can go and pick it up and send it to the warehouses and the bills for how long they were there because of the shutdown went up into the billions. And of course, because of that our GDP ended up going down our gross domestic product. And that was just one aspect of reason why I decided to run. Another reason why I decided to run was the fact that in Jacksonville, our current mayor, a Republican ended up shutting down the city, under the really nice and fuzzy name safer at home law, or whatever. And what that did was wipe out 130 businesses plus, in Jacksonville, all the mom and pop shops that we used to love that was the lifeblood of the city and end up going away, like fatal snap, it just out is gone. And 67% of those jobs are never going to be coming back. Right. And also during that time of September of 2020, the CDC moratorium was being implemented. Now the CDC moratorium put people in really precarious positions, because the people who were renting weren't paying money to the landlords that owned the property, and that these are the guys that weren't even paying before the shutdown. And when they started paying people to stay at home, and they weren't able to be evicted until they had to go through a court order, essentially intervening between a contractual obligation that was consensual between two entities, the landlord and the renter. And when that happened, the housing market ended up being in such a such a mess, the likes of which Jacksonville has never seen before. And because of that people ended up suffering a lot. There were a lot of break ins, a lot of a lot of violence going on in the streets, because a lot of people just didn't have any outlet or any place to go. My grandmother ended up having her house broken into maybe a couple of weeks after the CDC moratorium because she lives in the what would be considered the hood in Jacksonville, which was at that time, the district eight that I was running for. And so when that happened, a lot of companies started coming into Jacksonville and sort of buying the homes that were in foreclosure. And once they bought those homes, they ended up taking the debt from the previous tenants and started passing it off to the next person and prices sky I can as you can imagine, and Zillow wants to say that Jacksonville has a really hot housing market and all this type of stuff, but really, no, it doesn't. And in the news, you will see that they're saying that the mortgage rates for homes have been the lowest in about four months, or now it's become a little bit more affordable. But that's not true either, because they just moved debt from one place and move to the next. And where they moved to was in the utility sector, that means it's going to cost a lot more to build houses, because of the lumber shortage, it's going to cost more for insurance to insure these houses, it's going to cost a lot more to for a flame determined, it's going to cost a lot more for a lot of these things. And so through that time, when it's for me to run, it was the fact that a lot of the stuff that's going on was coming from a central local government intervention in my city, and it's affecting my people directly. And I decide to put my hat into the ring and give it a go.

Brian Nichols  5:55  
So let's take a step back, because I think it's important to kind of reframe, because I saw this a lot going from I lived in Philadelphia, PA during COVID. And now granted, right, Jacksonville at least had a Republican mayor, but that didn't really mean too much when they to shut down the city safer at home, how dystopian gross, you know, in that I sat there and watched my Governor tell me I'm essential versus non essential. And I'm like, I think I feel essential, right? Aren't we essentially if I don't have a job, how do I pay for bills is my job is central central to me. And you talk about what we experienced in these big cities. A lot of folks who didn't live in a big city, I don't think really got to appreciate how weird things got and how weird things still are. And I moved out of Philadelphia a year ago, which I got to tell you, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. And to still see the headlines. That's one of the benefits of still getting the news headlines pushed to my phone from Philly is I get to see what I'm not having to deal with anymore. Right. But I am totally not missing. And and that right there just speaks to why it is so important. I think not just to surround yourself with people who share like, like, like values, but also like goals and like vision for the future. So I guess I say all that right. And this is might be a hard question wrong, because you are running for office, and you're trying to get people on board with your mission. But is it tough right to run for office in a city but also to live in a city where sometimes it feels like you're the only person who seems to know what's going on in a world of so many other people who just seem to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Ronald Tracy Robison  7:48  
About that is a lot of people in Jacksonville really don't know what's going on, I wouldn't say it's a matter of complete, or in the case on some part, we just want to you have either apathy, or they don't know at all. And that's what I end up running into. In most cases. Some people just don't care, they feel like it doesn't matter what they do. The city's not going to listen to them. They, you know, they've been doing for so long going to the city council meetings and giving a very small, you know, a lot of amount of time for them to voice their concerns and nothing gets done. And you know, the, you know, raise up their voices, gathering people together protesting but it seems like it's just not clicking with with these people. I mean, it's really bad because Jacksonville City Council is so freakin huge. There's 19 seats in the council. There's 14 for each individual district district, one that I'm reading in, and five that are read large. And then you have this, you know, the council president. And so right, my problem with big government is that the representative ratio shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. That's how it always is. And excuse me, and what I do. What I've been doing for my campaign is stressing a lot about outreach, and not making it so hard for people to come to me to get information that I want to give to them. That's why you know, before we started the show, I let people I let you know that. Throughout the week, I go door to door house to house, whether it be in neighborhoods, whether it be subdivisions, whether it be businesses, whether it be churches, anywhere where I can go and reach people and hand out my flyers and on my cards and on my door hangers or whatever I need to do to pretty much evangelize my campaign, let them know what is what's going on. Some people think like, Hey, man, I already got a candidate that I'm going for them steering, but and then I'll say, Well, what have you considered this than a third hazard candidate considered this, that and the third? And they'll say, Oh, well, I never really thought about that. Okay, thanks for letting me know because most candidates will. There is no candidate in my race that's speaking about the things that I'm talking about because I reach for the root of the problem, as opposed to nine on the branches. Of course you have the Like I said, on Twitter, you have these vanilla milk toast candidates that Jacksonville has had for 50 plus years. And they'll just say the same thing. You know, let's make parks better. Let's bring our communities together. We're one Jacksonville, let's have civic engagement. You know, it's, you know, all that really long, empty platitudes. Yeah, yeah, empty platitudes that don't really mean anything, but they never talked about how we can actually get to the, to that point, you know, where we can have proper civic engagement, where we can have business owners having a lot more sovereignty over what they're doing, and how we can reduce the crime rates, you know, but they didn't get so when I go to the people with the most apathy, I find out that they're the most, ya know, that, like their eyes light up when a libertarian walked into the room, because I'm not talking the same stuff. That's their biggest critique of these politicians, because, hey, you're just gonna say the same thing. What's gonna separate you from the rest of the crowd? And I let them know that, hey, did you know that Jacksonville is $3 billion in debt, if not, for a million people to pay that off and make the city solvent, we got to pay a tax burden of $10,200 each, you know, and when I started my campaign, it was $2 billion. But then you had the the American rescue plan, the stimulus checks coming in the rental assistance programs, more money allotted from the taxpayers into the stadium for economic stimulation, even though you had over 130 small businesses, like I mentioned before, that was giving you the economics stimulation, you know, so they're panicking and trying to compensate for what the mayor ended up destroying, essentially, in the city that was going to give the prosperity that we were looking for. And or the fact that I let them know, as far as infrastructure is concerned, there's an area and Ocean Way in Jacksonville, specifically called Blue Wang, a blue whale and Moby Dick. Drive. Yeah, these are actual real streets. And I went there and I spoke to these guys. And they were submerged in 12 inches of water when Hurricane Irma ended up hitting the city. And they're not even in a flood zone. But they ended up flooding and being submerged in so much water, so many 1000s of dollars worth of damages, because of the fact that they've neglected the infrastructure around that area. There's a pond, there's a creek and there's a river. And what happened was the water ended up overflowing in the creek, because the coverts, which is the tube that the water goes through, in order to get hit the river, it was dammed and it was blocked. And so it ended up rising up, and then it spilled into the pond, and then over straight into the neighborhoods, and they suffered law for children almost died during that time, you know, I mean, like babies were, you know, laying down and if the mother hadn't woken up, or if the or the safe, the dog had jumped on the bed to let them know that it was flooding, the the baby would have drowned and stuff like that really hope, right? Real big horror stories, people in the neighborhoods, own boats, and kayaks try to do this than a third. And, and it's just it was just really, really bad. And the previous Councilman during that time, just he came there told them what they want to hear all that type of stuff just for the city engineers to come through, do the bare minimum and then get the hell out. But what I propose is a free market solution to these issues. There is a ton of COVID replacement companies in Jacksonville, that me as a city council person can go and facilitate the sale you come through, you give us a quote about what we can do to choose and get these covers fixed. And then I relay that to the community that directly benefits from it. And we facilitate a payment plan. You pay for Netflix, you pay for Hulu, you pay for Disney plus, and all that type of stuff. And we can put our money together for those that consent to it by the way, put the money together, put it payment plans, we can get it done so that engineers can come through and fix that stuff. And it can be a guaranteed job done because they're paying them directly. Unlike what government does, you keep paying your taxes up front just so they can drag their behind and not do the job in the first place. Right? Because we all know that government is the only business where they fail at the job they've been paid to do up front and they asked for a raise. That's it. And so yeah, this is one of those things I talked about. And it's revealing the problem and how a free market solution can fix it. You know, and that was cost of fixing. COVID is like $5,000 that thing, you know, especially considering that we have about last I checked about 45,000 people in my district that come on now there's way more than enough money to go around in order to get these things done in a free market perspective in the private sector. And there's no reason why we shouldn't be living extra taxes to for them to do something they should have been should have been doing in the first place. And every quarter once a quarter so we keep going on and and inspecting these infrastructures and make sure that is up to par because these things haven't been looked at in years. They probably put it down there and then he left it alone. We went through shamrock Apple shamrock drive south, I believe it was when we're campaigning down there. And we just mean my vice chairman of the Libertarian Party who was also my campaign manager and Eric Parker. We ended up just investigating where this where this ditch went and where are we was going and it was just trash, it was just unkept trees all have been their whole shopping carts sitting there and, and the water is so at the end of that ditch, it goes uphill. So of course the water is gonna go there, then it come right back around and not have anywhere else to go. So it's going to create flooding, and now they're subjected to flooding prices and that even in the flood zone insurance don't want to mess with them like that anymore, or they want to charge them over the head, because they're seeing more as a financial liability than an asset.

Brian Nichols  15:34  
So you're talking about the just beauty of government monopolies. Let's talk about another government monopoly. And it is in the spirit of school choice week as we record here today, in the the tail end of January. And let's talk about right now. Education in Jacksonville. You know, I see this conversation still permeate not just the the local conversation, but it's becoming more of a national conversation. We have folks like our good friend, Cory de Angeles, going around, and he is basically Cordy. Angeles, the evangelist who's going out and getting all these different states on board with funding students, not systems really exciting stuff. So talk to us about the advancement of school choice in Jacksonville, do we see that as an option? And if not, is that something that your campaign will be championing?

Ronald Tracy Robison  16:23  
Absolutely. The thing about schooling in Jacksonville, it's a big gang man, that's a big corporate body, it's its own government, of course, they have their own charter, they have their own policing unit, their own, you know, all of that type of stuff. And since I'm not running for school board, I'm often in this encouraged to talk about what's going on in Duval County Public Schools, but since they came after my mortgage last year, in order to pay for the payment of the pay for wasn't public school teachers, then that's where I get my voice, and I'm alleging that but what that situation was like, last year, Duval County Public Schools ended up giving the superintendent Her name was Diane Greene, a big fat raise real big, fat race, she gets paid twice as much as the mayor, she gets paid like over $300,000 a year, the mayor only get paid like over 100 and some 1000 and change. And that's amazing. And so my thing is, they could have put that same energy. And so given the money to these underpaid teachers that they were selling this bill for. And of course, I was campaigning and all that, and I wasn't really paying attention, until they said, We're gonna raise your property tax millage rate, in order to pay for them. That's when I started getting my hand into the rain. That's when that's when it became a problem, because that's my money that you're taking without my consent, in order to so called pay for it under, you know, under pay teachers. Yes, on my website, talking about the underpaid teacher myth. Now, private schools are paid way less than public school teachers. And that is because parents paid for their work directly. Like I was saying before, it's a mantra that I say all the time, so people can know, the grid to put things in proper perspective, what I'm talking about were libertarian standard, a lot of issues. And, yeah, they pay them directly, and they have twice the graduation rates as public schools. That's because if the teachers don't do their job adequately, then they're gone. You know, so because they have to compete within the open market. But public public school teachers, man they did they get way more fun, way more payments, they're really overpaid, especially for the quality of education, they're given to our kids. And so they have better retirement pension plans, I mean, vacation time, all that type of stuff. So that article, there was just one of those examples where I'm just deconstructing the whole myth of underpaid teachers, because that was how they were selling it in order to take our mortgage in order to pay for public school teachers. So me being a proponent of school choice. That's a definite that's, that's, that's, of course, Oh, yeah. And one of the ways for me personally, as a libertarian, some people ask me, What do I think about school choice? Hey, we need property tax reform, because there's no reason why people, especially elders, who don't have any children going into school, should be paying for other people's kids to go to public school, especially knowing the quality of education, and whatever the heck they're teaching in these public schools today, man, I mean, it's some sick stuff. And they complain about it, and they complain about it all the time, but they don't address the root issue and the root cause, and the things that will help school choice and have proper vouchers for these other schools and schooling institutions would be to have property tax reform, that will get rid of the fact that your property taxes are going to go into these public schools, that will be a big help for me. That is what I would advocate for in order to boost that cause.

Brian Nichols  19:57  
Well, Ron, unfortunately, we are all already hard pressed for time, which means, yes, it is time for final thoughts. And I think I will kick things off by saying, you know, this speaks to, I think you mentioned this throughout the conversation today, there are opportunities for us to help sell liberty in our everyday lives. We don't have to go out run for office, you don't have to go out and become a member of your local party, you can just be an average everyday citizen, and use those super citizen powers to make a difference by asking questions, and you can sell liberty by asking really thoughtful questions that make people think to make people say, like you said, Oh, I never thought about that before, the more people that we can get to start asking questions, the better chance we have of getting them to start moving away from their status quo solutions. So that's my final thoughts for today. Ron, what do you have for us,

Ronald Tracy Robison  20:53  
man, just want to say thank you for having me on the show. This was a lot of fun. I mean, I feel like I needed this after a long week of, you know, putting foot to the pavement. And I also want to mention that two other libertarians and Jacksonville are the ones who were following me people that support me continue to support Ronald Theresa Robinson for Jacksonville City Council in district eight by going to Ron Tracy, number four Jack's dot com and please donate to the to the campaign and don't look at as just a mere donation, look at it as an investment in order for you to have your financial independence. And so yeah, go to Ron Tracy. Number four, Jack's dot com, donate a minimum of $5. And up we need it for you know promotional materials such as interviews, such as this radio interviews, television appearances, billboards, and all the like the road signs, get your road signs and request, send me a message I'm going to give it to you also get the abolish the gas tax road sign as well to let them know what we stand for and who we are, as people of Jacksonville that just want to have complete constructive change.

Brian Nichols  21:59  
All right, folks, well, there's your call to action and also to help make it easier for you gonna make it as easy as possible by including all those links in the show notes. All you got to do if you're joining us here on the podcast version of the show, which I know 95% of you are, go ahead and swipe there up to Brian Nichols show.com. Just click the artwork and your podcast catcher should bring you right over you can go ahead find today's episode, the entire transcript from today's episode plus all those Affer mentioned links. And by the way, did you know you can go ahead and support the show while also getting some awesome libertarian swag that you can rock like we have our good ideas don't require for snapback we have our hoodies, we have t shirts, we have backpacks, garden signs, all that and more over at Brian Nichols show.com forward slash shop, do your self a favor and use code TBNS at checkout and also in the spirit of having so many local candidates on the show recently, I feel compelled to tell you guys about my brand new free eBook. And that is how to what when your local election is a free new ebook. And it's going to tell you yes, for anybody who's either running for local office, either for the first time you're thinking about running for office and you want to know what it entails. We're going through messaging, outreach, building your campaign all that and more. Grab Your Free Copy over at Brian Nichols show.com forward slash win local link for that over in the show notes. Any final words for us as we wrap things up today?

Ronald Tracy Robison  23:30  
No, I think I covered everything before once again go to Ron Tracy number four Jack's dot com please invest in the campaign so we can achieve financial freedom and independence.

Brian Nichols  23:41  
rock'n'roll. Alright folks. Well, with that being said thank you for joining us. Brian Nichols signing off. You're on The Brian Nichols Show. We'll see you tomorrow.

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