You offer two reasons (though really it's three.) The first is that if the government helps people (provides material support, in your phrase), it harms those people. Is this true? It's quite possibly true sometimes ,. But is it true by and large? You haven't offered any evidence, and I'm not convinced that there is any. In any case, when the government doesn't help people it's at least as plausible that at least some of the time, that results in harm. So even if both policies sometimes harm some people, that doesn't tell us which is worse. But there's another problem internal to your argument. You're in favor of various kinds of aid, so long as it's not provided by the government. Presumably you're in favor of that at least partly because you think it can actually do good. But if private charity can do good and help people, it's not obvious that having the help come from the government can't do likewise. Now there are questions here that philosophy alone can't answer: which kinds of aid...

You seem to be assuming that the idea of a positive right is nonsense, though perhaps you don't intend anything quite that strong. If that's what you do intend, then I'll leave it to others to say moe about the debate, but I'd simply note that it's not just obvious that only negative rights can be genuine rights. What I wanted to do instead is to highlight an assumption that lies behind your example and point out that it's open to question. It's the assumption that there's some antecedent fact of the matter about what's "your money." Like it or not, the money you earn (whether as salary or as an entrepreneur) comes to you within a system in which government is already deeply involved. There are courts and police. There are regulatory bodies that keep the banking system (for example) from turning into the wild west. There's a vast network of infrastructure that in fact is provided through the government. The list could clearly be extended. That background of rules, institutions, personnel, physical systems...

That's certainly one acceptable response. Others might include voting for a third candidate if one is available, writing in a candidate's name if the ballot allows, or, in extremis , spoiling the ballot as a protest. There's another issue worth raising. One might ask whether one's dislike of a candidate stands up to scrutiny. In this Presidential election, many people claim that they dislike both major party candidates. But a couple of things to bear in mind. 1) Personal dislike, as in "I find him/her obnoxious" doesn't strike me as a very good reason to vote against someone, especially if there's a lot at stake. What one might more reasonably care about is whether the politician favors policies that one find acceptable, and whether s/he will be effective at promoting them—whether or not s/he is someone whom you find obnoxious. Is what you find obnoxious just a matter of personality? Or is it a symptom of something that matters for larger reasons? 2) Is the dislike based on good information? Here I...

I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with a realistic picture of what this classless society would look like. People have different skills, talents, affinities, backgrounds... and in the normal course of things it's no surprise that classes form. It's true that governments spend time and resources ameliorating some of the more vicious effects of class differences, but humans being what they are, I'd guess that the only way to avoid the formation of classes altogether would be by means of heavy-duty coercion. That, however, would almost certainly come from the government, and so enforcing the classless society might well make the job of government harder, not easier. Or so I'd guess.

Two quick points. The first is that I've heard a great deal of talk about the dependency issue. Ad when I say "I've heard," I don't mean in my own social circle. I mean from politicians and professional pundits. Indeed, this issue of dependency has been a long-time GOP taking point. The second is that whatever the merits of that point, your questions suggests that most people on public assistance stay on it more or less permanently. But as far as I know, this is not actually true (except for the permanently disabled population.) Although I realize that Huffington Post is a liberal rather than a conservative site, the figures that this article draws on are not from a partisan source, and they're consistent with what I have heard from other sources: most (non-disabled) people who get public assistance get it temporarily. Here's the link. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/29/public-benefits-safety-net_n_7470060.html

Others on this panel have more insight into this sort of problem than I do, but my inclination is to say that there's no one answer. It depends on the actual situation and slate of candidates. Suppose one candidate, if elected, would be truly bad for democracy---would support all sorts of anti-democratic policies, and would have a good chance of getting them passed. Suppose the relevant alternatives are two candidates, neither of whom would support policies that undermine democracy, but one of them is markedly more to your liking on other issues. Then if you place highest value on preserving democracy, strategic voting may be exactly what your own values call for. If there's a real threat that a lot of votes for your preferred candidate would throw the election to someone who's truly undesirable by your own lights, it's hard to see how strategic voting could be a "perversion of the process"---the process is already perverse; you're just trying to mitigate that. Here's the problem. To say that...

I've never quite forgiven Ronald Reagan for making "liberal" into a slur, but letting that pass... I don't think there's necessarily any inconsistency here. Jesus told us to feed the poor, heal the sick, and turn the other cheek. But he didn't say that the government should be in charge of all this. In fact Jesus had more or less nothing to say about how secular government should be set up (unless you can extract a political theory from his cryptic remark about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's. It's consistent for someone to feel a duty to do what Jesus commanded and also to believe that the government shouldn't coercively extract money from people to carry out this mandate. As it happens, I'm a liberal and am quite happy to see government tax us to feed people, cure them, educate them, and so on. But I don't think politically conservative Christians are automatically guilty of confusion, let alone bad faith.

The big issue behind your question is the relationship between law and morality. That's a very big question, though on at lest one important view of what laws are (legal positivism) the answer to your question is no. On the positivist view, laws are, roughly, what lawmaking entities (legislatures, monarchs...) say they are. Whether a law is is another question, as is the question of whether you should obey some particular law. Whether you think this is right at the end of the day, it fits the common sense thought that there can be bad laws that are still laws. For example: I'd say that at least some aspects of US civil forfeiture laws are actually unjust. They allow the government to seize your property in ways that, these days, many liberals and conservatives agree are unjust. But critics of those laws don't claim that they aren't actually laws; they argue that the laws should be changed. In any case, there are laws that don't raise questions of justice. In the USA, the law says you drive on...

Is a society that criminalizes murder a free society? Depends on what you mean. If a free society is one in which nothing is forbidden, then if anything is criminalized, the society isn't free. But if that's what's meant by "free society," then no sane person would want to live in one. This suggests that taking "free society" to mean "society with no rules or restrictions" doesn't really get at what people mean when they use those words. As a first stab, it's probably better to say that a free society is one with no unjustifiable restrictions on people's liberty. That's not meant to say which societies are free, or to what extent. For one thing, there's room to argue about which restrictions are justifiable. For another, even insofar as we agree about that, it will almost certainly turn out that no legal system gets it exactly right. The better version of your question, I suggest, is whether it's justifiable for a society to criminalize speech that incites violence or libels someone. There's...

I'm a little worried about the distinction between the decision and the situation. A judge's decision is impartial, roughly, if it amounts to applying the law to the facts as opposed to tinkering with what the law actually calls for or what the facts actually amount to. The decision can be impartial even if the judge privately wishes that the right verdict were otherwise. A simple example: I might judge that one of two students deserves a prize because his record is stronger, even though I wish the other student were the one who should win. My judgment is impartial even though I have private and partial attitudes that, if acted on, might lead to a different result. Is the situation impartial? Perhaps not; I do, after all have a preference about how I wish things would turn out. But that's consistent with the decision being impartial. That's because there are many cases where we're capable of setting our personal views aside. And that's all we can reasonably ask. That said, in some cases it's asking...