Matthew Laszacs

I am morally opposed to abortion, however, I also believe that the government is incapable of efficiently or effectively enforcing any sort of abortion ban or regulation. Abortion is complex and the blunt mechanisms of government do not provide legislators with an effective tool to manage the issue precisely. We don't need government to solve every problem. The issue of abortion is better addressed by our religious institutions, our clergy, the greater community, and within our own homes.

Neutral

The question is moot because there is already a broad FDA requirement to ensure safety for all drugs. That reveals to me the much more compelling issue of the FDA blocking innovation in new drug development. Research indicates that the cost to get any drug through the FDA approval process and to market is close to two billion dollars, which necessarily leads to very few new drugs entering the marketplace for the benefit of humanity.

Strongly Agree

The government does not own my life; I do. I do not need their permission to end my life if I choose to do so. Likewise, I do not need their permission to seek assistance from a doctor to make the end of my life less violent and painful.

Agree

Strongly Agree

Research has indicated that minimum wage increases result in a net reduction of low-wage employment and an insignificant increase in low-wage worker's take home pay. There are better ways to address poverty, if that is the real goal.

No

Actuaries and pension fund managers' only goal should be to keep pension plans funded. Period. The ugly truth is that most of our government pension plans are underfunded and that taxpayers will have to absorb the debt in the near future. ESG is pure fantasy. Let's focus on solving the real and practical problem of paying our pensioners their full due while not burdening taxpayers with additional debt.

Never. If specific members of a church or congregation break the law or violate the rights of others, then they should be prosecuted individually and be afforded the full due process of the law.

Neutral

The government should not dictate hiring and firing practices to any private institution, be that a religious school or a hospital.

Yes

The Supreme Court in Espinoza v. Montana clearly ruled in favor of religious schools accepting state funds.

The political reality is that Medicare isn't going away anytime soon and NC just voted to extend Medicaid to able-bodied adults. In NC, we should be focused on increasing the supply of available healthcare services. We need to repeal our CON and SOP laws. These laws let incumbent providers block new, often cheaper competing service providers from entering the marketplace. Our healthcare system in NC is rigged in favor of incumbent providers. That is antithetical to our values.

Government should never force people to vaccinate. Period. I respect the right of private employers to require vaccinations as a term of employment. People can always choose to work elsewhere and employers are sensitive to losing valuable workers.

Neutral

The Chinese government has the impossible task of engineering an economy that can satisfy the desires of 1.39 billion people. Its empty "ghost cities" and "dumping" of grossly over produced goods are laughable. Meanwhile, China is cracking down on its people and becoming increasingly more authoritarian. We can out compete them, so we should sit back and let them destroy themselves from within while opening up immigration to take all of their best and brightest that flee the fallout.

Israel is an important trading partner and an ally of the United States. We should maintain normalized relations with them. We should, however, stop sending them money with strings attached and untether them from the interests of Washington DC politicians.

Strongly Agree

The government funds nutrition but does not run the grocery stores. The government funds seniors but does not operate the gas stations, drug stores, and shopping malls. Why does the government need to run schools? They don't. A single school system will never serve the needs of a huge population of students with widely disparate needs. We need to fund parents so that they can choose from the best mix of competitive educational services for their individual children.

Disagree

Agree

Disagree

The government should not dictate which values parents teach their children. These are private issues that should be resolved within the home by families, and not by external government coercion. The government is incapable of effectively resolving these kinds of sensitive personal issues, and we should not ask it to.

Strongly Disagree

The government should not define marriage in any particular way. Individuals have the right to live their lives according to their own beliefs and choose whom they wish to spend their lives with. This includes the freedom to select a religion that aligns with their values. The same freedom that allows for diverse religious and marital choices also protects those who adhere to the "one man, one woman" doctrine. Freedom means that no one can claim liberty for themselves while denying it to others

That is between me and God and is nobody else's business.

Neutral

There is neither widespread voter fraud nor widespread voter suppression. Both parties perpetuate this type of mythology with the express intention of stirring up outrage and creating division among voters. More troubling is the intention to undermine confidence in our elections and dissuade potential voters from participating in the democratic process. There has never been any evidence to support either of these partisan claims, and we should dismiss them both as obvious bogeymen.

Racism still exists to some extent in this country, and we should continue to confront it as a society. However, we must lead by embracing and emphasizing our common humanity, not by focusing on our differences and dividing ourselves into disparate groups. We can't truly love our neighbor unless we try to understand them. We can't understand them if we can't engage in open conversation with them, and we can't engage in a real conversation when we are divided.

Neutral

There is value in objectively examining our interactions with others to determine if bias may have influenced our actions. I view CRT as a useful tool for this purpose, but it is just one tool among many different lenses that we can use to analyze our world. CRT becomes problematic when people rely on it as their primary lens for viewing the world and the entirety of their interactions with others. It is important to use a variety of perspectives to understand the complex dynamics of humanity.

Neutral

The government should not impose participation rules on private sporting organizations. For public organizations, such as K-12 schools or public universities, the decision on participation rules should be left to the parents and student body of each individual organization. This approach respects the autonomy of private institutions while empowering communities to make decisions that best reflect their values and needs.

The earth is warming, but it is not necessarily due to the actions of man. Humans want to keep things the same; it is in our nature to fear and push back on change, but there is nothing we can do to stop the climate from changing. Who made us the arbiters of earth's optimal climate, anyway? It is an arrogant, human-centric, and unhumble notion. Punishing people for their purported carbon output will do nothing to save the earth, and it will disproportionately harm low-income and working people.

Laws are punishment. Punishment is violence. Since laws are the only output of the government, government is violence. We are born free. We own ourselves. No government can give us our freedom, but the government can take it away—if we let it. Government holds a monopoly on violence; therefore, it must be limited. The only job of government, then, is to maximize the freedom of its citizens by minimizing the laws—the punishment and violence—it levies against them.

No.

No.

Choose not to answer

None of the above. I am a classical liberal and a Libertarian.

Neutral

Half of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights were specifically written to make it difficult to put people in cages, yet our government imprisons a greater percentage of our NC population than almost every other developed nation. We have a failed criminal injustice system; a system that creates more criminals through profligate imprisonment than it rehabilitates. Our police are good people toiling in a broken system. Lets attack the system and not the people and put justice back in the title

I fully support constitutional carry. We don't need special permission from the government to exercise our Second Amendment rights.