Jill Stein has met the legal requirement for primary season matching funds in nine states: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. She needs eleven more states to be eligible.
4 Comments
Comments are closed.
There’s a long standing debate among libertarians about the ethics of accepting matching funds. Gary Johnson has no moral problem with it, but as a practical matter he found that the FEC did not give him money it promised which the campaign was counting on and then demanded money back that had already been paid, so from what I have been told he does not want to try for it again. As far as I know Jill Stein and the Greens have had no moral or practical problem with it, nor am I aware of any such debate among Greens.
Setting aside “taxes = theft” or not, I wouldn’t call it voluntary or coercion-free. You can check the box, and if you do $3 is put in the fund by the government. But your tax bill is the same either way, you don’t have the option of keeping that $3. You have to pay the $3 like it or not, you just decide whether it goes into this program, or into the general treasury with the rest of your tax dollars. It being structured that way isn’t really about qualms over the coercion in the taxation, it’s more about avoiding coerced *speech*.
On the other hand, subsidizing political campaigns is probably a less harmful use of that money than whatever else the government was going to spend it on. I don’t think candidates who take the matching funds are doing anything wrong on their end. But on the government’s end, it’s still a coercive apparatus and not something I’d support as Libertarian policy.
In other words– “Come see the violence inherent in the system!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axE83zcx6wY
It’s not stolen. Primary season matching funds are funded by money that is collected from taxpayers who check a box on their income tax return.
“Progress”? Accepting stolen tax dollars.