Asked why Alabama voters should care whether or not the Libertarian Party is on the November ballot, John Sophocleus offers this simple analogy.

“When you go into a town to buy a car,” asked Sophocleus, “which would you rather see, two car dealerships or seven car dealerships?”

Sophocleus is the Libertarian candidate for governor. The former Auburn University economics professor bills himself as “an economist promoting competition in Alabama’s political markets.”

“I genuinely believe that competition is good for the marketplace, including the political marketplace,” he said.

Sophocleus traces many of today’s political ills to the longstanding “dual-opoly” of the Democratic and Republican parties in America.

“There was a time,” he explained, “when party monikers meant something. That’s no longer the case. There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans today. All the party switching over the past decade is evidence of that.

“There is no fundamental disagreement among these candidates over what they want: higher taxes in order to feed their insatiable special interest and pork-barrel spending projects.”

Sophocleus contrasted that approach with the fundamental Libertarian tenet that if there’s anything that can be done cheaper and more efficiently by the private sector, it should be. That includes things like political primaries.

“The Libertarian Party does not believe in wasting taxpayers’ money on primaries and runoffs,” he said.

Sophocleus pointed to the current Democratic Party contest of the state House of Representatives District 67 runoff as a prime example of taxpayers being forced to pay for what, essentially, is a Democratic Party disagreement. Libertarians argue that each political party should pay for its own process of selecting candidates.

If that seems radical, he added, it’s only because the two dominant political parties have “strayed outside the system as it was designed to work.” He said the Libertarian Party aims to lead things back to the way they were and to “get the government out of things it should never have been in.”

“Do I get tired of being the little kid screaming, ‘The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes!’?” Sophocleus asked rhetorically. “Yes, I do.”

Sophocleus said there are signs that Alabama voters may finally be ready to hear the Libertarian message. “People are saying ‘enough’s enough,'” he said. “They’re tired of the same old thing coming out of the Democratic and Republican parties.”

The Libertarian Party will field more than 30 candidates this November, according to Sophocleus. Getting them on the ballot wasn’t easy, he added. He labeled Alabama’s ballot access law, which requires 40,000 signatures for a third-party candidate to be included on the ballot in a statewide race, among the most anti-competitive in the nation.

“What the Democrats and Republicans want,” Sophocleus said, “is for you to waste your time garnering signatures instead of discussing issues.”

Although the Libertarians satisfied the requirements for being included on the ballot come November, Sophocleus said they were “boxed out” of the upcoming debates between his gubernatorial opponents, Don Siegelman and Bob Riley.

“I think that was a huge disservice to Alabama voters,” he said. “I think it’s time for people in Alabama to stand up and say that when somebody worked this hard it’s time to let him in.”