DEBATE: Should We PRIVATIZE Firefighters?

The Kim Iversen Show LIVE | September 3, 2026 Protect your wealth with precious metals! Call American Hartford Gold today & get up to $20,000 in free silver on your 1st order! Call 8665843884 or Text KIM to 65532, or click here

Kim sits down with Austin Petersen — libertarian presidential candidate, former Fox Business producer, Missouri Senate challenger, and karate sensei — for a wide-ranging and genuinely fun debate that goes from self-defense to wildfire liability to whether the Founding Fathers would be more impressed with China. They start with martial arts and why getting punched in the face should be a prerequisite for having opinions about war, move through what women actually think about every time they walk to their car alone, hit the trans debate through a libertarian lens (Austin's honest answer: it's the same logic as vaccine choice, and consistency matters), and get into whether it should be legal to let your kid starve to death — the question that broke Austin's anarchist phase. Then the Missouri breakfast grandma: Kathy Kite, population-300 town, no gas station left, opens her home and makes free breakfast for neighbors — tips optional — until the county shows up demanding a commercial kitchen that would cost more than her heritage house is worth. Kim and Austin debate food safety, how many friends you're legally allowed to have, the Kansas City BBQ festival where government inspectors pour bleach over leftover food rather than let it go to the homeless, and whether private charity works better than state welfare when the state stops letting private charity happen. They square off on zoning, HOAs, wildfire liability in Malibu (Kim does not feel bad for the rich people — the insurance companies already told them the risk), private vs. government fire departments, and the Palisades fire. And they close on the death of the libertarian moment: why 2016 was the zenith, why libertarians make bad political allies, how Bernie Sanders and Trump were the same anti-dynasty vote in different fonts, and what it would take to thread the needle between principle and power.

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