Hello, DU. I am a libertarian.

[Scuba]

7. My thoughts ....

I agree with a simplified tax code, but a flat tax is very regressive.

Imagine two people, one who makes $10,000/year, and one who makes $1,000,000/year. Suppose the flat tax rate is 25%.

After paying taxes, the person earning $10,000 only has $7,500 left. If the poor bastard's rent + utilities = $500/month, that's another $6,000 for housing. If he can get by on $100/ month for food, that's another $1,200. He'll have to get by on $300 worth of clothing for the year just to meet the basic necessities of life. (Food, shelter, clothing.) And at the end of the year, he's still just barely treading water.

Now, let's head out to the 'burbs. After taxes, Joe Millionaire has $750,000 left over. To keep it all nice and round numbers, let's assume his mortgage + utilities = $10,000/month. Let's suppose his food bill is $2,000 a month (he buys caviar and champagne, rather than ramen noodles and malt liquor) And let's suppose he's a raving metrosexual who drops $20,000 a year on clothes.

Joe Millionaire still has $586,000 left over at the end of the year to buy Porsches, vacation in Arruba, and invest in his kids' trust funds.

THAT'S why the flat tax hurts the poor more than the rich - food, shelter, clothing. Those basic necessities don't scale equally.

As for the minimum wage, I don't know what studies you've seen, perhaps you can provide some citations, but here's some data ...

Contrary to the conservative narrative, unemployment actually decreases a majority of the time when the minimum wage is increased. The few times that unemployment increased after a raise in the minimum wage can only be used to claim there is no correlation between minimum wage increases and job growth. The idea that there is statistical proof that raising the minimum wage kills jobs is laughable at best.

Monthly unemployment statistics were not available until 1948 but yearly unemployment when the minimum wage was established was 19.1% and I think we all know what direction it went after that.

Here's the most recent results ...

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119440/states-raised-their-minimum-wages-had-stronger-job-growth

In 2014, 13 states raised their minimum wages, five through legislation and eight through inflation indexing. Gould compared wage growth for the bottom 10 percent of Americans in those 13 states with the rest of America. In the former, real wages grew 0.9 percent, a non-negligible increase. In the remaining 37 states, real wages declined 0.1 percent. In other words, wage growth for the bottom 10 percent of Americans is entirely attributable to states that increased their minimum wages.

.....

That’s good news, but it’s not unexpected. Conservatives largely concede that raising the minimum wage increases wages. They oppose it, they say, because it will reduce job growth. So, did that happen in those 13 states? Jared Bernstein, the former chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden and a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, looked at the data. He found that job growth was higher in states that raised their minimum wages than it was in those that didn’t (1.8 percent versus 1.5 percent).

As for limits on firearm ownership, it sounds like you draw a line between fully automatic rifles and shoulder-fired missiles. I'm not sure how this fits into the definition of libertarian.

As for "freedom of association", it sounds like you are OK with businesses having the right to discriminate and refuse to serve certain classes of customers? Is that right?

You'll get much agreement here on the topic of marriage.

Finally, you didn't mention government regulation of business. As this is a basic principle of classical libertarianism, it's curious you didn't include it in your definition of what makes you a libertarian. Do you advocate getting rid of the EPA, FDA, OSHA, USDA, etc?