Gay Marriage & Prop 8 - My position & why both sides are wrong.

As a person who lives in California I hear a lot of discussion of prop 8. Prop 8 was a ballot proposition that attempted to add the definition of marriage as a man and women in the state constitution. I personally voted no on prop 8 but did so for very different reasons than most people. I wanted to give a brief description of my position and why I think both sides are in many ways wrong.

People ask if I’m in favor of “gay marriage” – I’m not.
People ask if I’m in favor of “straight/traditional” marriage – I’m not.

I’m against the state.

In other words, I’m against the government being involved with marriage as an institution. I don’t believe it’s the role of the government to get involved in regulating what should be a private social institution.

This may seem like an odd position but all of us feel this way about other social or traditional rituals/institutions. Here is a list of things that many of us would be against the state being involved in, and this is what it would look like if they were involved in them.

Friendship licenses
A baptism license/permit
Birthday party permit
Sex contract/license

Imagine if the state were to require its people get a “baptism” license before they baptize their child. Certainly you can argue for the “sanctity” of baptism, the very definition of sanctity is holiness, saintliness, or godliness – which is the very reason we should oppose the state being involved. Is the purpose of the state to give us phony and meaningless documents “allowing” us to engage in activities like marriage or baptism? Is the idea of getting “permission” from a government to go fishing or have a birthday party consistent with a free society, or is it more consistent with a totalitarian one?

The proper function of the state I think most would agree is to protect our liberties, provide courts to handle disputes, and other basic functions – not to define and regulate rituals or traditions.

Now many will point out that the logic behind a marriage “license” is also a legal one. Many will point out that being married is a contract between two people that addresses issues like property inheritance, hospital visits, and other issues.

Of course these are all benefits that still could exist under secular civil unions. As of now you can get a civil union with anyone to resolve issues like this – even two roommates who were just friends could get a civil union. Marriage would still exist if we were to abolish state sponsored marriage, in the same way baptisms & birthday parties exist without the state. The difference would be a couple would get married in a church or whatever they wanted, it would be equally meaningful and “holy” in their eyes, but if they also wanted to resolve the legal issues they could get a civil union.

This may be an odd analogy but consider the way it is with driver’s license. As of now you can buy whatever vehicle you want – you can buy a motorcycle, a pink van, a tiny blue car whatever you like. The choice of color, type, size and location of purchase is something you decide. Of course if you want to use the state sponsored roads you must get a drivers license and registration. The registration process is secular and has nothing to do with the type or color of your car; it just is there to say “Hey California, I’m going to be driving around all right?”

The state is there to provide the legal stuff; you pick the car you want. Under our current system of marriage, it would be analogous to the state defining what color car you can drive and letting the people vote on “Prop 64 – to define a vehicle as a yellow Honda civic” – It’s a bazaar analogy but it makes the point.

How would abolishing the state’s involvement in marriage solve anything?

The reason that I believe this is the best way to resolve the ‘gay marriage’ debate is that it takes marriage out of the hands of the state and into the hands of the people – which will satisfy everyone involved. Here’s how:

Religious and traditional people personally do not recognize same-sex marriages and so naturally they’d be opposed to the state changing the definition of marriage. The underlying problem that defenders of traditional marriage have is with what definition they personally feel is right & moral being changed – this problem would disappear under privatized marriage. The Catholic Church defines its own doctrines, and the Democratic Party defines its values, and the state can’t dictate either values or doctrine to either of these organizations – why – because the state is not involved.

Under privatized marriage free men will define their own rituals and institutions according to their religious or personal beliefs, and would not have to bow down to some government that attempts to regulate their life.

Gay marriage supporters could get married or have whatever ritual they see fit and could get a secular civil union without any question. Of course the traditional marriage people may still not recognize their marriage as legitimate, and may even deny them access to their church for ceremonies – so what? That’s a product of a free society.

I do not recognize the Christian church as legitimate in the sense that its existence stands for truth since I believe Christianity is false. Mormons do not consider satanic rituals as legitimate, and many atheists do not see the Jewish tradition of chopping up a young boy’s penis up as legitimate. It’s a better world where people are free to decide on what they recognize as legitimate and not to have the state try to define things it has no business defining.

In short the problem isn’t with whether to define marriage this way or another, the problem is accepting that something as meaningful can even be up for a vote at all. Thomas Paine was quoted saying “That government is best which governs least” and I tend to agree with him.

Liberal economic confusion

1. NO TAX CUT BUILDS A ROAD

BARNEY FRANK: —that cannot be accomplished by a tax cut. No tax cut builds a road. No tax cut puts a cop on the street. No tax cut educates a child in the way that it ought to be done. So this—only tax cuts, at a time when I think we have a deficiency in some areas that are important for the quality of our life, is a big disagreement. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSw3QqSF_zU

There are a few things to say about this.

First, nobody claims a tax cut builds a road.

Second, because something does not build a road or puts a cop on the street is not a reason to be opposed to it when we’re talking about what is good for the US economy. Computers and beer do not put a cop on the street, so what? Are we supposed to oppose them on that ground?

Third, there’s a sense in which it’s false anyway. There are private roads, cops, and schools. These things exist because people have money. It’s easy to imagine how a “tax cut” which results in people having more of their own money using that money to pay for services like security, or education.



2. TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH

Obviously there’s an ocean of fallacious claims and reasoning when it comes to economics and especially with any statement that ends with “for the rich” by economic totalitarians (liberals). I’d like to briefly address some common claims.

On Bill Maher, he shows a graph showing that the bush tax cuts resulted in the top 10% of US earners keeping a lot more in dollars than 90%

(video here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrWXk6BCsXQ )

The graph shows that out of all the people who benefited, the “rich” received the most in terms of dollars, and this is supposed to show that the tax cuts were unfair. There are a few things to say about this.

First, by definition the “rich” will save the most in dollars than the non-rich. 25% of a million is 250,000, and 25% of 100 is 25. So waving around a graph showing that people with more money save more money when their taxes are reduced does not prove anything. Imagine if all people making 1 million dollars a year paid 50% in taxes (Leaving them only $500k a year), and all people who make $10k a year pay 10% in taxes (leaving them 9k). Now let’s say they lower taxes on the “rich” by 1% point, and cut taxes completely on the poor, where they pay nothing.

The rich would save $90k, and the poor would save $1k. The rich’s taxes were lowered 1% point, and the poor now by nothing. Wow! The “rich” got 90x what the poor got! Man, I can’t wait to go home and make a graph in PowerPoint so I can wave it around to people talking about how unfair that is. The point is that what’s important is the percentage, not the savings in dollars.

Second, let’s say its true the rich benefited the most from the tax cuts. Let’s say its true that they were the only ones in the US who got any tax cut. So what? You don’t judge the fairness of a tax on who pays what compared to whom, but what a group is paying to what they were paying. The rich paying 99% in taxes would be evil, and unjust – If they were to have their taxes reduced, and their taxes alone this would be justified even though the other groups did not get a tax break. The reality is showing that fairness is something that should be judged on more than just “who got what compared to the poor”


3. POLICY X WILL CREATE JOBS

A common argument in favor of a certain policy or government program is that the program or policy will result in jobs, and jobs are good and mean economic stimulus. A recent gimmick is Obama’s claim that his giant spending plan (he calls it the stimulus package) will result in jobs from the ‘infrastructure’ spending, and therefore it is simulative.

First, the principle ‘if x results in a job, then x is good for the economy’ is false. Cancer, brain tumors, and mental retardation all result in millions of jobs in the medical field, and yet it’s obvious that cancer is not ‘good’ for the economy. This is known as the ‘broken window fallacy.’ The fallacy is the idea that if X results in a job, X is good for the economy would imply that we could help the economy by tossing bricks into windows, resulting in a high demand for window repair jobs and windows.

Second, even if we can agree that X is simulative, it still needs to be weighed against the costs. We can all agree that a machine that makes cars is an economically desirable machine, since it allows more cars to be made, but if the man selling the machine demands a billion dollars a day for its use, then the benefits may not outweigh the costs. This is where the idea of ‘government jobs’ and the inherent wasteful nature of government comes in. If a man tried to sell his machine at a billion a day in the free market, buyers would reject the offer since they are spending their own money. The result would be the man would sell nothing if he does not lower his price. In government, where people are spending other people’s money, the incentive to be careful & ‘look for a good deal’ is not as strong. In addition, if the people vote for a person who promises a program, if that man is voted in then his main incentive is to create the program regardless of costs. In ‘Economics in One Lesson’ by Henry Hazlitt he expands on this.

“A bridge is built, If it is built to meet an insistent public demand, if it solves a traffic problem or a transportation problem otherwise insoluble, if, in short, it is even more necessary than the things for which the taxpayers would have spent their money if it had not been taxed away from them, there can be no objection. But a bridge built primarily "to provide employment" is a different kind of bridge. When providing employment becomes the end, need becomes a subordinate consideration. "Projects" have to he invented. Instead of thinking only where bridges must be built, the government spenders
begin to ask themselves where bridges can be built. Can they think of plausible reasons why an additional bridge should connect Easton and Weston? It soon becomes absolutely essential. Those who doubt the necessity are dismissed as obstructionists and reactionaries. Two arguments are put forward for the bridge, one of which is mainly heard before it is built, the other of which is mainly heard after it has been completed. The first argument is that it will provide employment. It will provide, say, 500 jobs for a year. The implication is that these are jobs that would not otherwise have come into existence. This is what is immediately seen. But if we have trained ourselves to look beyond immediate to secondary consequences, and beyond those who are directly benefited by a government project to others who are indirectly affected, a different picture presents itself. It is true that a particular group of bridge workers may receive more employment than otherwise. But the bridge has to be paid for out of taxes. For every dollar that is spent on the bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000,000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most. Therefore for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else.”

Bailouts, Socialism, & bankrupt reasoning

1. X is too big to fail, and if it failed bad things would happen. Therefore the government should give X a bailout.

If we accept the idea of something being “too big to fail” as a reason to justify a bailout, then is the government too big to fail?

If you accept that the government is too big to fail, then the same kind of reasoning applies. The question then is, what would it look like for “the government to fail” and what could cause a “government to fail”?

In the same way a business fails due to lack of funds, the state could fail for the same reason. California is a great example of failure since it’s currently so bankrupt, from its citizens voting massive spending, that it actually talked about giving people “IOU’s” instead of the tax money they were owed. California even wanted to get a bailout of its own.

"I propose that we should get help from the federal government if we can again, also like the car manufacturers, prove that we have our fiscal house in order and that we can solve our problems ourselves but give us in this emergency kind of a situation or this crisis some addition money," – Schwarzenegger

So, now that we answered what it means for a government to fail, what would cause it? In California it was massive spending. If too much spending can cause a state to fail, what is a bailout? – Massive spending.

What does this mean? This means that simply by thinking for 1-2 minutes about the logic behind bailouts, you can be opposed to them *using the very same reasoning* people use to be in favor of them. If X is too big to fail, then Y ought to bail it out. Replace X with government and what could you possibly replace Y with? The only thing truly bankrupt is the logic used by the socialists in favor of bailouts. (Please don’t point out that Bush & Schwarzenegger favor bailouts as a way of showing it’s not socialist. Bush & Schwarzenegger are both socialists in that respect, and simply because you claim to be a conservative does not mean you are.)