jsupim1

Schools in general should not get state funding.

Britain doesn't need a monarchy, because politics in countries without a monarchy doesn't seem to function worse than in Britain. But this does not imply that Britain should get rid of the monarchy - that's an entirely different question.

Why do you think it's more damaging than beneficial?

"There has been no reliable evidence to show that conversion therapy is successful"
Is there really no reliable evidence, or you just didn't bother to look for it?

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2 (especially Vol. 12, Pela & Sutton)
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I agree with the claim. However, the number of people who are in favour of the maxim and yet choose to ignore it when it comes to such things as mandatory minimum wage, private schooling and private college, gun control, etc., (judging by the results of other polls on the website) is astounding.

After all, if state should not regulate consensual sex between two adults in a private bedroom, then why should it regulate a consensual employment relation between two adults in a private bedroom? What about the same relation, but outside of a private bedroom? It seems counterintuitive that location would have any bearing on the answer. Why should it be the state's business to regulate what kind of private education, private medical care or private counselling happens in a private bedroom or, more generally, behind closed doors? Yet, most states do heavily regulate these things and people don't seem to realize the contradiction.

The only kind of tax that is even remotely just is tax that's equal in absolute terms. If you pay 1000$ of tax, I should also be paying 1000$ of tax; no more, no less. This is because we are both human and as such have equal rights and equal responsibilities. A potential difference in income doesn't change that and cannot be grounds for discrimination against rich people. (Furthermore, how much someone earns is most likely not strongly correlated with how much they benefit from government expenditures, so how much they pay to the government shouldn't be strongly correlated with the income either.)

The current situation, in which rich people pay higher taxes, is caused by discrimination of the wealthy by a non-wealthy majority, who benefits from the wealth stolen from the rich. This is, of course, facilitated by democracy, which favours the majority over the inalienable rights of the minority. The general population has a negative opinion of the rich and, on top of that, either doesn't reflect upon what is truly just or simply wants to syphon off their wealth for the general population's selfish gains. Because wealthy people are such a small fraction of the society, their votes or influence don't swing elections, and as I have shown, very few non-wealthy people care about them. Thus, their rights can be outright ignored by politicians who desire to have even a remote chance of getting elected.

A state could rely on voluntary donations instead.

Your example is a highly unusual scenario. In a vast majority of cases, there is no externality involved in voluntary transactions, so your justification would fail. Furthermore, accounting for negative externalities of an economic activity is not really something I would classify as taxation; in the example of a paint factory, that would rather be a fine imposed on the pollutant that would be ideally used for cleanup efforts.

In general, taxes are a source of market distortions and a major cause of inefficiencies that are wrongly blamed on free markets.

A society is not civilised at all if its supposed achievements are built upon such an unethical, unjust idea as taxation.

Policing, schools, trash disposal, street lighting etc can be provided for by the free market, which is more efficient at it.

If you agree that "it is likely a mix of both societal influence and nature", then you should mark your answer as "against", not mixed. (Because the claim "people are born gay" implies it is only a matter of nature, and you've just said it is not.)

Whether private prisons do, in fact, produce good vs bad outcomes is not that relevant to the question of whether they should be banned. Not only does this reasoning commit the utilitarian fallacy, but there is also another problem: it is difficult to establish a causal relationship between the property of being a private prison and the outcomes for prison populations.

Your argument seems to be:

1. Private prisons have such-and-such effects.
2. The effects are the only thing we should care about.
3. Therefore, private prisons should be banned.

Let's leave aside point (2), which I disagree with. Regarding (1), the effects you quoted are not necessarily caused by the fact that prisons are private. Rather, they might be caused by a confounding variable, which (i) might be shared between a subset of private and public prisons and happen to be more frequent in the former, (ii) might be possible to eliminate from private prisons without sacrificing their benefits. Specific incentives would be one type of such variable. Some public prisons might, in fact, have similar twisted incentives to private ones.

This is a strange question. Of course people have the right to choose their pronouns (I believe in most cases these would be: "I/me/my/mine"; any other pronouns would create a lot of confusion). However, and this also seems obvious, people generally do not have the right to choose what pronouns other people must use. This includes the pronouns people use to refer to the subject in the question.

Whether inequality is fair or unfair is independent of the quantity of the inequality. This is because inequality is not unfair in itself (if it is, I'm happy to hear arguments as to why).

What matters is the cause of that inequality - the cause might be fair (as in: being compensated for the work performed or a reward for investing the capital) or unfair (as in: receiving a government benefit without providing anything in return). Inequality might be small, with unfair causes, or large with fair causes. So, just to reiterate, there is no reason to think a large amount of inequality is inherently less fair than a small amount of inequality.

As I wrote in my answer below, fairness of inequality doesn't really depend on its level, but rather on its cause. Most causes of inequality have nothing to do with unfairness, therefore most types of inequality (and therefore most levels) are not unfair.

Of course it depends on the quantity. Probably everyone will agree that one second of time is less important than one billion dollars. Therefore, the statement "Time is more important than money" has counterexamples. Therefore, the statement is false.