But he is not so “Libertarian” that he refuses to accept government subsidies.
There's no point saying this in a real discussion.
Those are all “Libertarian stances”.
Personally I'd make the opposite change (everyone should be exempt) but religious organizations shouldn't get special treatment just because they're religious. The practice of having special rules which only come into play when religion is involved undermines the separation of church and state; it means that the state is discriminating between citizens on the basis of the presence of absence of a (recognized) religion.
> Corporations, and any community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition (but only if no part of its activities involve the provision of athletic facilities or equipment), or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals
Religious organizations are exempt from tax, but so are PETA and the ACLU. Against that background, efforts to strip tax exemptions from churches are a deliberate attack on religious organizations as compared to other civic organizations.
There are plenty of other areas where the government shows favoritism toward religious organizations besides 501(c)3 status. For example, ministers are exempt from federal income tax withholding, despite being classified as W-2 employees, and can opt out of Social Security taxes via Form 4361, which is available only to "An ordained, commissioned, or licensed minister of a church; A member of a religious order who has not taken a vow of poverty; or A Christian Science practitioner."[0] (That last one is oddly specific… and goes so far as to endorse a specific religious organization.) Membership in a "health care sharing ministry" also offers, or did offer while it was still in force, an exception to the individual insurance mandate under the Affordable Care Act (26 U.S. Code § 5000A(d)(2), "Religious Exemptions"[1]).
Ministers are exempt from withholding but they still have to pay it, and they pay FICA taxes like self employed workers: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc417
And that was the point. Other organizations have to be based around some particular beneficial purpose such as charity or education in order to qualify, and that classification can be challenged if, for example, a "charitable" organization doesn't actually redistribute most of the money it receives to charitable causes, but you can start a religious-themed amusement park (charging admission!) and call it a "church" and it's automatically tax-exempt.[0]
> exempt from withholding but they still have to pay it
Which means they're getting several months' worth of extra growth out of that portion of their income than everyone else by paying it at the end of the tax year rather than having it withheld from their paycheck. It's clearly a religious privilege; other W-2 employees would opt out of withholding if they could, but they can't since they aren't ministers.
> and they pay FICA taxes like self employed workers
Despite not being self-employed, and only if they don't use Form 4361 to opt out of Social Security, as I said before. Which is something which can only be done on religious grounds, or a lot more people would be doing the same, as SS is a poor retirement strategy compared to investing the same amount of money privately. (The average rate of return for SS contributions is lower than T-bills, much less mutual funds or stocks.)
[0] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/os-holy-land-experi...
There are some historical nuances about power dynamics and avoiding conflict between the church and state, but that is all long ago.
But it's 2022, not 1992, and a lot of contemporary conservative causes are based on coding conservative positions as being based on "religious beliefs" and liberal positions as being based on some sort of "rational morality." But that distinction is fictitious.
For example, liberals decry Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban as "imposing religious beliefs." So why do highly secular countries like France and Denmark draw the line at 13 or 14 weeks? In reality, the abortion debate rests on competing moral ideologies--one that emphasizes the importance of reproduction, and one that emphasizes the importance of individual choice. Neither position is based primarily on scientific facts or rigorous logic.
Likewise, when it comes to teaching kids about sex and gender. "God created man and woman and told them to reproduce" is a religious gloss on the factual observation that humanity comprises two sexes which reproduce sexually, and any sustainable human population requires each woman on average to have 2.1 children. Any conclusions you want to draw on top of that are moral judgments, not based on science or logic.
It's no different when it comes to law enforcement. Unless you're an anarcho-libertarian, you recognize that the state has a role in defending individual rights. Moreover, any system of law enforcement is going to produce problems and false positives at scale--especially when dealing with people at the margin of culpability. Leaving aside second-order effects for a moment, there is nothing inherently libertarian about asserting that we should err on the side of less aggressive policing to reduce the false positives, at the cost of allowing more wrong-doers to escape punishment. Likewise, there is nothing inherently libertarian about saying that destroying private property in riots is a justified reaction to police misconduct. These are all liberal moral judgments.
None of this is to say that liberals are wrong about any of these things. It's okay to formulate positions based on moral ideology rather than logic. My point is simply that you can't stake out a bunch of positions based on moral ideology, while claiming the high ground of secular rationalism and attacking your political opponents as "imposing religion."
Why does it always seem like the people who are on the “margin of culpability” always minorities? Like when Ving Rhames was suspiciously sitting in his own house (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/28/ving-rhames-...)
There are plenty of statistics showing minorities are stopped at a higher rate, convicted more harshly, face higher bail, etc for the same crime when you control for everything else.
So if you should only marry to reproduce, does that mean old people shouldn’t get married? Should we stop people who take steps not to reproduce? Conservatives use to fight to outlaw birth control and it is still the stance of many.
None of these are “Libertarian” stances.
Who said this?
Except the current debate isn't about marriage law, it's about what kids should be taught in school, and when. It's one thing to have marriage law accommodate different groups with different beliefs about the basis of marriage. It's a different thing to teach any particular view or set of moral judgments to kids in public schools.
> Conservatives use to fight to outlaw birth control and it is still the stance of many.
As I noted in my post, it's 2022, not 1992. Today, 90% of conservatives agree with 93% of liberals that birth control is morally acceptable. https://news.gallup.com/poll/257858/birth-control-tops-list-....
Conservatives and libertarians were on opposite sides of this issue in the 1960s. But today, the political dispute is over privately owned companies being forced to pay for birth control for employees. And on the contemporary issue, libertarians and conservatives are on the same side.
For example, the significant majority of Americans think that sex between teenagers is not morally acceptable (54-42). Do the teachers who want to teach these facts believe that? Will they use materials that depict sexual interactions between teenagers—as in many of the books that have become controversial recently? Conservatives—and many moderates, given the Florida law has strong public support—view this as a “tip of the iceberg” situation.
Isn’t the entire idea behind “libertarianism” that you can do whatever the hell you want to do as long as it doesn’t affect others?
Shouldn’t Libertarianism be more concerned about teaching that you should conform to the standards of a religious institution?
> For example, the significant majority of Americans think that sex between teenagers is not morally acceptable (54-42). Do the teachers who want to teach these facts believe that? Will they use materials that depict sexual interactions between teenagers (as in many of the books that have become controversial recently)?
Yes because “abstinence education” has shown to be really effective. I’m sure if teachers have all of their students take “abstinence pledges” it’s going to stop them from having sex just like the “Just Say No” campaigns stopped teenagers from smoking weed.
I can’t help but notice how you’ve framed this in terms of “choice” and “self expression.” Do you see why even parents who want their kids to learn to be accepting of these biologically-determined differences might be wary of how the message will be delivered in practice?
> Isn’t the entire idea behind “libertarianism” that you can do whatever the hell you want to do as long as it doesn’t affect others?
That applies to adults, who are fully developed persons. But the moral socialization of your own children—dependent humans with underdeveloped brains—is within the ambit of what the State shouldn’t mess with. Aversion to social engineering is a key distinction between liberals and libertarians on this front.
> Shouldn’t Libertarianism be more concerned about teaching that you should conform to the standards of a religious institution?
You’re not allowed to teach that in public schools either. And libertarians should be concerned about the State trying to socialize children in the opposite ideology too.
> Yes because “abstinence education” has shown to be really effective. I’m sure if teachers have all of their students take “abstinence pledges” it’s going to stop them from having sex
Teenagers will draw outside the lines. All the more reason to draw those lines rigidly. And again you confirm what ideologies will come in through the door of these discussions.
> just like the “Just Say No” campaigns stopped teenagers from smoking weed.
Legalization of weed seems to have resulted in a significant uptick in smoking of marijuana.
> Teenagers will draw outside the lines. All the more reason to draw those lines rigidly. And again you confirm what ideologies will come in through the door of these discussions.
No matter how you “draw the lines”, do you really think little Johny and Sue are going to decide not to have sex because their teacher told them “it was wrong”? Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach them how to be safe?
Sure I would rather my underage son not drink. But I also have told him if he is in a position where he shouldn’t be driving, call me. Well at least that’s the old school way. I told him to call an Uber and if I see him home without his car - no preaching. Just call the Uber to take him back to his car.
> Legalization of weed seems to have resulted in a significant uptick in smoking of marijuana.
More importantly it’s taken a tool out of the toolbelt of the police state - something that libertarians should want.
Who shouldn’t? The way you framed it—in terms of “choice” and “self expression”—it could apply to everyone. Certainly, it’s not the role of teachers to tell straight kids that they don’t have to conform to Biblical or Quranic teachings if that’s what their parents want. That’s the point. Liberals believe in non-conformity, self-fulfillment, and self-expression for everyone. Many parents therefore don’t trust liberal teachers to talk to their kids about topics that implicate morality. (My Bangladeshi immigrant mom flipped out when my high school counselor suggested I major in European History given my interests. She doesn’t suffer fools!)
> No matter how you “draw the lines”, do you really think little Johny and Sue are going to decide not to have sex because their teacher told them “it was wrong”?
Many won’t, and even the ones that do will learn to keep sex a private part of their life and identity. Either way, the point is that—e.g. some white American teacher doesn’t get to decide how some Muslim kid is socialized to think about sex.
Libertarianism is premised on independent rational actors. Libertarian freedom doesn’t apply directly to children. Instead the freedom from State interference applies to the parents in deciding how to socialize their dependent, mentally undeveloped children.
Because that is the only time it makes the news. It sort of follows with Coulter's Law which states roughly that if the race of a suspect isn't initially mentioned, they are non-white.
>There are plenty of statistics showing minorities are stopped at a higher rate, convicted more harshly, face higher bail, etc for the same crime when you control for everything else.
I actually used to assume this to be true. However, when you factor for income level of suspects, the variance disappears. This is probably why you almost never see black millionaires in prison. Even with Bill Cosby it took hundreds of allegations across over 40 years before he did time. Because he had money.
The police definitely don’t know my household income level (I work remotely for $BigTech and I make over twice the median income in my county) when they see my 6 foot 3 son walking through our neighborhood back to our house in a county that’s only 3.9% Black and stopped him to question him twice.
For this to be true though, whites would also have the same advantages over Asians, but it's the opposite. So logically does that mean whites are discriminated against more than Asians, since that is what the numbers say? Or is it maybe that different cultures are more or less likely than others to do things that warrant police attention?
Another example of your logical fallacy is comparing men vs women. There are HUGE disparities in police interactions between men and women, is it because of sexism or is it possible that one gender reacts more aggressively during interactions with police on average..?
I had to look this up and while it's somewhat true, it's highly misleading. "On demand" abortion in Denmark is limited until 12 weeks. However you can still get an abortion afterwards "if the woman's life or health are in danger" or "if certain circumstances are proved to be present (such as poor socioeconomic condition of the woman, risk of birth defects in the baby, the pregnancy being the result of rape, or mental health risk to mother)."[1]
The special circumstances allowed by the Mississippi abortion ban are much more narrow, including only medical emergencies and severe fetal abnormality[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Denmark
[2] https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/texas/mississippi-ab...
Moreover, both agree that there are extenuating circumstances that can change the balance in specific cases. And they agree on the particular extenuating circumstances that are most likely to arise: risk of severe deterioration to woman's physical health, and fetal abnormalities.
All you're pointing out is that Denmark recognizes additional extenuating circumstances for special cases. Specifically, the health exception covers the risk of "severe deterioration of woman's physical or mental health." But note that the "risk to a woman's life or to her physical or mental health should be based solely or principally on circumstances of a medical character." The other grounds for second trimester abortions require unanimous approval from a special committee: https://cyber.harvard.edu/population/abortion/Denmark.abo.ht.... They are not an open-ended exception to allow second trimester abortions in ordinary cases.
I would say the former isn't about the value of reproduction any more than the principle of not killing a one-year-old is not about reproduction. It's about what counts as murder, based on what counts as human life. Whether or not one thinks of a 15 week old as being human life is all the question is about.
Yes, people don't realize that Roe v. Wade made abortion far more permissible in the US than in almost every other Western country. The only exception I am aware of is Canada, which because of a series of accidents ended up with no abortion laws at all.
I have several liberal beliefs myself, but do think that other liberals delude themselves into thinking that they are somehow scientific judgements, opposed to simple moral sentiments, inherently subjective.
I’ve had this idea that many people who talk about libertarianism, but particularly in the US those who vocalize their alignment with the Libertarian Party are just republicans who don’t want to admit it. The famous “libertarian” Thiel going mask off and then helping build the surveillance state and military industrial context convinced me.
“Conservatives” are for maintaining the power of status quo elites (in most modern developed economies, that means capitalist elites), generally by marshalling traditional/religious justifications.
These views fit together...rather well, actually.
To use abortion as an archetypal example: a fetus’s right to life is traditionally coded as “religious” and a woman’s right to autonomy is traditionally coded as “secular” but they’re both just assertions in competing belief systems. Neither of those things are scientific truths that will turn up in an autopsy—much less any conclusions you draw about how to strike a balance between the two. Thus there is no necessarily libertarian take on abortion. In a free society that recognizes that morality may be the basis for law, there is no real way to keep the government out of abortion; only to ensure that competing moral views are reconciled democratically: https://reason.com/2015/08/14/sorry-rand-paul-haters-pro-lif....
Likewise many contemporary conservative debates have to do with what public schools (the State) teach kids against the wishes of parents. These teachings, for the most part, are not scientific truths like evolution or climate change, but rather unfalsifiable moral assertions. The true libertarian solution here would be something like school vouchers, but taking public schools as a given, it’s wholly consistent for libertarians to side with religious parents against State schools that want to teach their kids a particular moral framework.
Conservatives and libertarians are different. But it’s 2022, and the alignment of contemporary conservative political causes is different than in 1992.
This does not follow. There are various ways to approach a libertarian position on the morality of abortion per se which don't devolve into "striking a balance" between conflicting rights (a decidedly non-libertarian concept; natural rights are all negative rights, which do not conflict), but in the end it doesn't matter because there is only one entity involved with both the ability and the standing to justly apply either defensive or retributive force in response to a threatened or actual infringement of their rights, and that is the woman having the abortion. Anyone else using violence to either stop the abortion or punish the woman for having it would be in violation of the Non-Aggression Principle, as they are neither directly harmed by it nor acting with the informed consent of, and under the direction of, any party who was harmed.
> The true libertarian solution here would be something like school vouchers…
The "true libertarian solution" here would be private schools, with 100% private funding. Though of course anything that allows for more choice in where students can receive their education and what they are allowed to learn represents a step in the right direction, all else being equal.
> There is only one entity involved with both the ability and the standing to justly apply either defensive or retributive force in response to a threatened or actual infringement of their rights
Presumably your stance here is that the fetus does not have the ability to apply defensive or retributive force, and therefore has no right to it. This seems to suggest you hold a "might makes right" morality: If someone isn't able to defend themselves, then they have no right to. Taken to its logical end, wouldn't this imply that any murder would not be immoral, since if someone was not able to defend themself from murder, then there is no violation of the Non-Aggression Principle?
No, that "therefore" does not follow. One does not lose a right just because one lacks the power to exercise it. The fetus would not be wrong to employ violence to resist any attempt to kill it—though even putting it in those terms presumes a degree of conscious decision-making and self-ownership which is not in evidence.
> Taken to its logical end, wouldn't this imply that any murder would not be immoral…?
No. To begin with, I never said that abortion wasn't immoral or a violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. Both of those are debatable; from a libertarian point of view the answer to the latter question hinges on whether the fetus can claim self-ownership, which presumes a degree of conscious control and responsibility for the effect of one's actions on others.
That is all quite abstract, however, because in practical terms it would be a violation of the NAP for anyone else to intervene. An adult, or even a young child, who found themselves harmed or threatened with harm could consent to allow someone else to fight on their behalf; or, just as importantly, could withhold that consent. (For example, they could be a pacifist and believe that fighting back would be immoral.) In the case of a murder one could look to a will or the like as evidence of the victim's wishes. For an abortion, however, there is no such evidence. Anyone responding to it with force is doing so entirely on their own, and not in self-defense, which makes them the aggressor.
Standing is where the Libertarian argument collapses. It is the age old question of when does a human have standing and a right to life. Can you kill your 5 year old child, 1 year old, 9 month fetus, 15 week, fetus, ect?
There is no clear libertarian or scientific answer for when rights and "standing" enter the human body. You extended the NAP to requiring direction or awareness from the harmed party, but there is the matter of time.
Would the harmed party in this case object if given time and awareness? If you shoot someone before they object, do they have no standing? If you poison them secretly, without knowledge to object, do they have no standing?
Anything that is harmed has standing, human or not, conscious or not. A tree has standing to fight back when it's threatened with an axe. The fetus certainly has standing here. What it lacks is the ability to act on it, or to request or consent to someone else acting on it. Not only physically but developmentally, it lacks the capacity to make conscious, intentional, deliberate choices and take responsibility for the consequences. Likewise for "right to life"—the right to respond with defensive force against aggression which threatens your life. It has the right to defend its own life but not the ability.
> You extended the NAP to requiring direction or awareness from the harmed party…
I didn't "extend" anything. The NAP is a convention which applies only between self-owners, as otherwise action affecting any lifeform (cattle, plants, …), or even non-living matter, without its "consent" (assuming that's even possible) could be read as a violation of the NAP. The question of whether the "harmed party" does in fact have the quality of self-ownership is thus relevant. Whether an entity has self-ownership is determined by its ability (and will) to make choices and take responsibility for their consequences.
This, by the way, is the root of the justification for employing defensive force: Deliberately causing harm to others, or failing to take responsibility for unintended consequences of one's actions, undermines one's status as a self-owner, thus placing one outside the protection of the NAP. The relationship changes from that of two self-owners to that of a human actor and a harmful element of their environment.
> Would the harmed party in this case object if given time and awareness?
Would the tree object to being cut down if we found some way to endow it with consciousness and the ability to communicate? Perhaps, but that isn't the situation we actually find ourselves in, and it won't happen unless someone puts in the effort to make it happen.
> If you shoot someone before they object…? If you poison them secretly, without knowledge to object…?
Obviously they have standing, but that isn't really the point since they're dead and can't do anything about it. They have a (posthumous) right to restitution and retribution in either case. The question is whether they delegated the enforcement of that right to someone else (which could be "anyone" or a specific person or group) before they were killed. If not, that doesn't imply that the victim didn't have a right to live or that it wasn't wrong to kill them, but it does mean it would be wrong for someone else who wasn't harmed to initiate violence unilaterally against their killer, when they can't rationally claim to be acting for the victim in accordance with their wishes.
But every position I argued in my original post is about giving the government less power over people that objectively doesn’t affect someone else.
The version of the history of the founding of the US is very much a sugar coated version of what actually happened.
There are very few conservative teachers who teach the Lost Cause version of the civil war. There are some debates within the historical community so it isn't really fully settled though. Many in the North were talking about the federal government trampling state's rights and they weren't talking about slavery so it isn't quite as simple as you make it out to be.
I assume you are talking about slavery when it comes to your last point? If that is the case there are no conservative teachers denying slavery happening in the US including the fact that some of the founding fathers had slaves.
As far as the “Lost Cause” not being taught..,
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/education/20...
Are we in 1992 or 2022? Because I learned the "real history" of the civil war growing up in Virginia in the early 1990s back when it was solidly Republican.
It takes immense willful blindness not to acknowledge that the opposition to "CRT" in schools arose at the same time as school districts began paying folks like Ibram Kendi to come lecture to teachers: https://www.fox5dc.com/news/fairfax-county-schools-defending....
If you're a parent whose school sent them a reading list including Kendi, who writes in his latest book:
> The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
Maybe, just maybe, you might have objections that while not supporting "Lost Cause" narratives of the Civil War?