First a couple of definitions:

Violence: Using force or the threat of force to do something to someone else against their will.

Immoral: Something is immoral if it makes life worse.

These are not a perfect definitions but hopefully they help to describe what I mean.

For starters I have to admit that the quote “You can’t legislate morality” is a bit vague and easy to misunderstand, but that’s almost always a problem with these easy to say/remember axioms.

A longer, less ambiguous way to say what I mean would be:

Just because something is immoral does not mean there should be a law making it illegal.

Another way to put it would be:

If you want to justify a law to make X illegal you need a better argument then just demonstrating that X is immoral.

And:

You should not try to legislate morality.

And:

The standard for having a law to make X illegal (and punishing people who are guilty of X) should be that X is an act of violence not just that it is immoral.

Here’s a picture that might help too.

So all the stuff in the big circle is immoral stuff (stuff I do not want people to do). However in order for me to think we need a law to make any given immoral act illegal it also need to be a violent act.

Why? I’m glad you asked. There are lots of reasons. However this is the main one.

It is bad to be the aggressor. So the first person to resort to violence is the bad person.

If someone is doing something immoral but is not being violent and someone else uses violence to stop them from doing it they become the aggressor and are now also acting immorally.

This is what’s called the Non-agression-principle.

The non-aggression principle is an important part of my moral framework and it should be a part of yours.

1.  Monetary Policy, protecting the strength of our currency. Inflation is the worst kind of tax,  and we can do a lot of things right as a nation, but if our money is not worth anything, making things better is going to be much harder.
2. Foreign Policy. We need to start minding our own business. Initially we need our attitude to change so foreign governments do not view us as a threat. Long term, we need to get military bases out of foreign countries and end “entangling alliances”.
3. Protect personal freedom and privacy.
4. Fiscal responsibility. Get rid of the national debt as soon as possible.

As far as I can tell neither of the presidential candidates plan to make any of these a priority. Am I wrong?

I would like a presidential candidate who agrees with me on 3 out of 4 of these issues.

Who could I vote for?