So the responses to my post (on its thread here and in other venues) ironically asking a question about conservative redistribution were passionate and intelligent. Still, they’re basically objections I anticipated. My real bottom-line question: Is “being a parent” a limit on even a realistically libertarian definition of what a conservative is? John Locke, for the record, answered yes. But most of my NRO readers disagreed.

Here are some propositions put forward. Each has some plausibility (or more) and demands further discussion. That’s because their truth is far from self-evident.

A tax credit for children is no different from a tax credit for homebuyers. Both are catering to special interests. ’Nuff said.

We wouldn’t have to worry about the “birth dearth” if it weren’t for the Ponzi schemes that are our entitlements. There’s no other reason to be concerned with our “graying” society.

Anyway, if we got rid of the entitlements, people would start having more kids again. After all, who needs kids to take care of you in your old age if you have social security and Medicare?

Any public policy aimed at encouraging or facilitating parenthood is fascism.

That’s because either you’re an individualist or a collectivist. In other words, either you’re a “liberal” or you’re a “democrat.”

What we should do for parents is what we do for everyone else. Maximize their choices, as in school choice. The concern with how children are raised stops there.

Parenthood is a choice or “preference” no different, at least under the law, from choosing to have a dog or choosing to be a Baptist.

Cut taxes and deregulate. The new birth of economic growth will result in lots of jobs with higher wages. Issue of struggling ordinary people not having the wherewithal to balance work and parenting resolved.

Sure, government should be concerned about marriage and the family. But our Constitution reserves all that to the states. The national Constitution is rigorously individualistic, even if its scope is limited.

But, many more consistent libertarians say that there’s no difference between one form of government and another. The Fourteenth Amendment, in the service of liberty, took out that distinction in our Constitution. For the same reason there’s a right to same-sex marriage that can be enforced by the Court, there ought to be a Court that would take out the legal privileging of (or redistribution toward) parenting.