[Malatant of Shadow]

Still, please explain why you believe that constitutional limitations on majority rule, such as the rights of the accused, freedom of non-political speech and separation of church and state are justified, whereas similar constitutional limitations on majority rule by way of protection of property rights aren't.

Very simple. I consider that not to be arbitrarily punished at law without due process and assurance of guilt, the right to speak one's mind and engage in free creative expression, and freedom of religion (which is dependent on no one religion being officially endorsed by the state) to be rights deserving of protection, while unlimited and unrestrained accumulation of property is not.

One reason I take this view is because any item of property which is mine is thereby not anyone else's, and my accumulation of wealth may therefore reach a point where I am depriving others of livelihood. My exercise of free speech may have consequences for others, too (e.g. someone may be offended by it), but these consequences do not violate what, in my subjective and non-rational judgment, I believe to be their rights.

[SolarCross]

The Story of your Enslavement

Liberalism is just another kind of people farming.

[Eran]

One reason I take this view is because any item of property which is mine is thereby not anyone else's, and my accumulation of wealth may therefore reach a point where I am depriving others of livelihood.

First, wealth is created all the time. Production and trade aren't a zero-sum game. Would you support a constitutional amendment that would restrict government from blocking wealth-creating activities?

Second, much of government's activity has nothing to do with property per-se, but with regulating people's behaviour. Would you support a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the regulation of peaceful activities?

Finally, as I noted elsewhere, "livelihood" isn't one's property. People lose their livelihood all the time, due to changes in circumstances, technology, consumer preferences, etc.

[Malatant of Shadow]

First, wealth is created all the time. Production and trade aren't a zero-sum game. Would you support a constitutional amendment that would restrict government from blocking wealth-creating activities?

Absolutely not, ESPECIALLY since we are not all in agreement in regard to what constitutes "wealth-creating activities" and what constitutes "blocking" them, and despite occasional assertions to the contrary that one can sometimes find, these are not objectively-demonstrable and certain facts. (Those saying so usually don't employ empirical methods to determine fact anyway.)

I understand that wealth isn't a zero-sum game, but the conclusion that some draw from this fact -- that one person's accumulation of wealth does not affect anyone else's ability to do so -- does not follow. In fact, while wealth can indeed be created, the evidence from economic history is that it's created faster when it is widely dispersed than when it is concentrated into fewer hands, so the "smaller piece of a bigger pie" concept doesn't hold true -- it's actually a smaller piece of a smaller pie that the non-rich are stuck with when the rich are allowed to get richer without restraint, meaning they're screwed twice over.

It's not a foot race. It's more like mud-wrestling.

Second, much of government's activity has nothing to do with property per-se, but with regulating people's behaviour. Would you support a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the regulation of peaceful activities?

I don't think so, although I had to think about that one a bit longer. It's too broad, too ham-handed. It also amounts to forcing social evolution and that seldom works. You may have noted that two U.S. states legalized marijuana this year, and several same-sex-marriage initiatives also passed on a state level. We continue to evolve in the right direction on these things. As long as evolution is working, revolution is a bad idea IMO.

Finally, as I noted elsewhere, "livelihood" isn't one's property. People lose their livelihood all the time, due to changes in circumstances, technology, consumer preferences, etc.

True enough, and that's the difference between wealth and income I noted above. Still, the two are connected. The more property is concentrated, the less opportunity there is to acquire it, and the more difficult it is to acquire a livelihood. That's the biggest single reason why I am against an absolute right to property.

[Distracted]

I noticed that neither Malatant nor Distracted address Constitutional limitations on majoritarian rule except perhaps those required to ensure the persistence of institutions of a liberal democracy (free political speech, the franchise, freedom of assembly).

Let me pose the question directly to you and other liberals, and not confuse the issue with more detailed rebuttal (for now).

Do you support Constitutional limitations on majority rules on such issues as the rights of the accused, freedom of non-political speech, and separation of church and state?

If so, how do such limitations reconcile with your notion of "ideological dictatorship"?

Why are limitations on the majority's ability to dictate religious practices any more acceptable than limitations on the majority's ability to confiscate property at will?

I can't answer that final question because I don't accept the premise. The fact that a certain set of ideas your ideology is against appear to be hypocritical in the context of your ideology is not surprising. Your idea of property could be phrased in a question by me to seem hypocritical and anti-liberty if i were asking it in the context of a statement that assumes a slightly different interpretation of Lockean property to be right, much less other ideologies from other philosophers that are equally valid unless you believe all people everywhere should be enslaved to the same set of dead British philosophers.

Once we take your premise that a state that enforces the laws of the self-governing/consent granting society is an act of coercion, then there is literally no objective mechanism any set of ideas, including your own, could be enforced without being through coercion. Your argument against that is that under your ideas what the state would be doing wouldn't be coercive.

That's great, under my ideas what the state does wouldn't be coercive. According to me. Just as in a society based on your views, what the state does wouldn't be coercive, according to you.

Your argument seems predicated on the idea that anyone who doesn't recognize the objective truth of your ideas is either lying or crazy, and I refuse to argue from that position. I'm not going to answer questions based around the idea that your views are correct, I'm going to challenge your views, as they conflict with mine. If you consider that to be an evasion, then you are never going get a straight answer. Even if I used right market libertarian/anarcho-capitalist principles to argue my position or to call into question your position, you would view it as an evasion because it would by its very nature be a statement that does not accept your principles as being true.

Why should I have to take the anti-liberty stance or defend my views as being hypocritical when they are hypocritical in the context of your view of liberty, just because you believe your views are libertarian? Why shouldn't you have to take that stance and defend the many ways which in the context of my beliefs your views are hypocritical and self-defeating?

If you are only willing to argue in the context of your beliefs being objectively true and observable for all to see, everyone is going to seem like they are evading or arguing semantics. And I've played that game with enough people convinced everyone who disagreed with them was evil or crazy to know that isn't productive, and to not be pulled into the trap of arguing from the position that I need to defend my beliefs in the context of your beliefs.

Asking someone how they can support protection of religious liberty without protection of property without them being a hypocrite is like asking someone if they have stopped beating their wife. If they never beat their wife, if they don't believe what you are referring to are property rights or a violation therefore of, then they can't answer the question properly. I reject the premise of your question. I do not find your views of property to be self-evident and thus I think you need to, when asking others to make their views make sense in the context of your views, at least spell it out that way in the phrase so it is an If/Then question. Otherwise what you are doing is a rhetorical technique, quite like the old joke about "Have you stopped beating your wife?" and how there is no right answer to that question.

[Eran]

In fact, while wealth can indeed be created, the evidence from economic history is that it's created faster when it is widely dispersed than when it is concentrated into fewer hands, so the "smaller piece of a bigger pie" concept doesn't hold true -- it's actually a smaller piece of a smaller pie that the non-rich are stuck with when the rich are allowed to get richer without restraint, meaning they're screwed twice over.

Wealth is created fastest when people are free to pursue their economic ends as freely as possible under an environment in which their property rights (i.e. the fruits of their wealth-creation efforts) are secure.

When people's property rights are subject to the whim of politicians, those with close ties to those politicians benefit, causing a concentration of wealth. Thus political intervention in the economy, always harmful, can at times have the effect of increasing wealth concentrations.

This is clearly what we have seen in recent decades with government subsidies (direct, indirect and deferred) of the financial industry.

We continue to evolve in the right direction on these things. As long as evolution is working, revolution is a bad idea IMO.

Yet you presumably support the separate of Church and State, a revolution when it was introduced.

More to the point, your majoritarian sentiments are clearly inconsistently applied. It is legitimate (probably, in your mind, commendable) to stop the majority from oppressing the minority on certain issues (private sexual practices, religious practice, freedom of speech, fighting crime), while it would be wrong to block the majority from oppressing the minority on other issues (e.g. drugs, not to mention trading).

Contrast that with the libertarian position which is both moral and consistent - it is always wrong for the majority (or minority - for anybody) to use force against others, or to force their views on others. We can have a reasonable debate regarding what constitutes use of force, or forcing your views on others, but that debate ought to be reasonable. There is no way that prohibiting the private cultivation and use of Marijuana by adults, for example, can reasonably be considered anything other than forcing the majority's views on the minority.

The more property is concentrated, the less opportunity there is to acquire it, and the more difficult it is to acquire a livelihood.

This is both false and misleading. It is false, because acquisition of property, as noted above, isn't a zero-sum game. Rather, wealth is created, and one's ability to create wealth isn't diminished by the concentrated holding of existing wealth. In fact, if one is concerned about the abuse associated with the concentration of power that comes from concentration of property, one should be much more concerned about the concentration of power in the hands of politicians and regulators.

If I work in a given industry, I can always compete against established participants in the industry by offering a superior product to their customers. Unless, that is, the existing actors conspire with politicians to "regulate" the industry, and, directly or effectively, prohibit me from so doing.

Your statement is also highly misleading because it creates the impression that wealth in any modern society has ever been concentrated in private hands to a degree that materially slowed people from acquiring wealth.

In fact today, wealth is incredibly highly dispersed. Startup capital for promising businesses is available from thousands of banks, private equity, venture capital and other types of institutions. Wealth would have been even more dispersed, and acquiring capital required to start a business even easier if it weren't for government securities regulations.

Once we take your premise that a state that enforces the laws of the self-governing/consent granting society is an act of coercion, then there is literally no objective mechanism any set of ideas, including your own, could be enforced without being through coercion

Not at all.

There is no way that purely voluntary activities or the use of previously-unused natural resources can be reasonably considered "coercive". The difference between my ideology and yours isn't one of perspective. I am advocating a system in which peaceful people are left alone. You do not.

I accept reasonable differences of opinion regarding what constitutes being peaceful, just as I accept differences in opinion regarding what constitutes the legitimate acquisition of property. But no reasonable person can object to the very notion of being peaceful, nor do most people seriously object to the notion of private property (if only in movable goods rather than land).

Consequently, one can describe an objective difference between a system which allows (regardless for rationale) people to use the threat of force to coerce otherwise peaceful people (or, equivalently, to use the threat of force to take people's legitimate property) and a system which prohibits, as a matter of principle, such activities.

Why shouldn't you have to take that stance and defend the many ways which in the context of my beliefs your views are hypocritical and self-defeating?

I'd be happy to do that.

Asking someone how they can support protection of religious liberty without protection of property without them being a hypocrite is like asking someone if they have stopped beating their wife.

I understand your point, but that's not what I asked.

I didn't try to claim that you are hypocritical for defending protection of religious liberty without protection of property.

Rather, I am trying to understand your own rationale for deviations from your basic premise of majoritarianism. Please do correct me if I am wrong, but I understand your (and the liberal position in general) as follows:
1. In general, a community ought to be self-governing in the sense of having rules and laws be determined through an effective (informed, free, etc.) majority
2. Certain exceptions to that rule are called for, e.g. with respect to securing religious liberties even in the face of a majority opinion to the contrary.

Am I correct? If not, how? If I am correct so far, my question is how do you determine how the powers of the majority ought to be limited?

[Malatant of Shadow]

[
Wealth is created fastest when people are free to pursue their economic ends blah blah blah

Oh, please, Eran. Quit spouting free-market boilerplate for a minute and actually LOOK at the conditions under which wealth has been produced fastest, using measures that are objective and easy to take, not stuff like that which is too dependent on subjective evaluation.

Wealth is created fastest when income gaps are relatively narrow, and slower when they are wide. That's an observable, historical fact. Whether that condition means "people are free to pursue their economic ends" (I'm sure the ones making higher wages would think so, but the ones whose quick-return investments were hindered by high taxes might argue to the contrary -- it's all a question of whose ox is getting gored in the end) -- I leave all that to your subjective judgment, as it's one I'm not particularly interested in making.

As for the rest of your post, I reserve the right to be logically inconsistent in service to pragmatism.

[Eran]

Wealth is created fastest when income gaps are relatively narrow, and slower when they are wide. That's an observable, historical fact.

Do you have any references?

I observe that wealth was created much more quickly in 19th century America (unequal) than in 20th century Russia (supposedly equal).
More quickly in unequal West Germany than in equal East Germany.
More quickly in 20th century America (less equal) than Western Europe (more equal).

Where is your evidence?

[Malatant of Shadow]

Do you have any references?

I've already given them more than once and I'm not going to repeat myself again.

I observe that wealth was created much more quickly in 19th century America (unequal) than in 20th century Russia (supposedly equal).

First, untrue; second, too many variables. Don't look at so-called Communist countries. That's too distorting. Look at variations in capitalism between narrow and wide income gaps, with other variables more nearly constant.

As a point of fact -- not that I think this comparison is valid even when it supports my argument -- Russia in the 1930s exhibited the fastest economic growth in the history of the planet. That's not hard to explain, and the explanation is very ugly: it was Stalin's brutal program of crash industrialization. We need not consider this as something to emulate. But it was much faster than America's growth in the Gilded Age.

[Eran]

What possible confidence can anybody have with economic statistics coming out of 1930s Russia???

Setting that aside, I do agree with your point regarding having too many variables.

In fact, this is an endemic problem with measuring the effect of government policies. Since at any point in time, only one government rules a given area, it is never possible to actually compare the effects of government policies without encountering this very problem.

We could never know, for example, what kind of poverty reduction would have come about without Johnson's War on Poverty.

The fact that the War seems to have terminated a long-term trend in reduction of poverty, and that such long-term trend was effectively halted (not just in the mid-1970s - the reduction trend was never recovered even during the booming years of subsequent decades) is, in my opinion, telling.

[Malatant of Shadow]

What possible confidence can anybody have with economic statistics coming out of 1930s Russia???

While the figures may have been wrong (or lied about) in detail, we can verify the rapid growth generally by the industrial output that allowed the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany. Stalin accomplished for his country in a single decade what capitalism accomplished in America in almost ten times as long. Unfortunately, it was also around ten times as cruel and the toll in death and suffering was hideous.

not just in the mid-1970s - the reduction trend was never recovered even during the booming years of subsequent decades

1973 began just about a full decade of economic problems driven by oil shortages. The problems, although they changed manifestation due to a shift in government policy, lasted into the early Reagan years and were not cured until new oil supplies outside OPEC's control came on the market in 1982-3. There's about a ten-year lead-time for development of major new oil reserves, especially offshore ones. Under Nixon, Ford, and Carter, government policy headed off a severe recession at the cost of high inflation. Under Reagan's leadership this was reversed and the economy was allowed to enter a harsh downturn, the worst between 1929 and 2008. The new oil supplies came on line just barely in time to rescue his reelection prospects. He was a very lucky man.

Because this juxtaposition of events made it seem as if Reagan's sharp policy shift had "saved the economy," supply-side economics became the new dogma. Taxes on the rich were cut way back, they were raised on the middle class, support for labor unions all but disappeared, and while social welfare programs were not actually dismantled they were cut back and allowed to stagnate. It seems to me that in this, we have all the explanation we need for why the poverty rate did not come down again once prosperity was restored in the mid-1980s.

[Distracted]

Rather, I am trying to understand your own rationale for deviations from your basic premise of majoritarianism. Please do correct me if I am wrong, but I understand your (and the liberal position in general) as follows:
1. In general, a community ought to be self-governing in the sense of having rules and laws be determined through an effective (informed, free, etc.) majority
2. Certain exceptions to that rule are called for, e.g. with respect to securing religious liberties even in the face of a majority opinion to the contrary.

Am I correct? If not, how? If I am correct so far, my question is how do you determine how the powers of the majority ought to be limited?

Actually, the principle justifying a constitution that bans adoption of a state religion is the same one I've been using against the adoption of a state ideology, which is in effect what you are proposing. The same way the liberal constitution allows for majority self-government but not for one majority once to put in a religion that will dominate everyone in the constitutional framework indefinitely, it allows for you or I to vote based on our philosophical views of property ownership but does not provide a basis for either of us putting that into the constitution.

You seem to be comparing a ban on voting to institute a state religion to a ban on voting to tax fortunes; that if you have one limitation of the majority, why not the other. I don't find that comparison accurate, and instead find a ban on voting to institute a state religion far more comparable to a ban on instituting a state ideology, as I was saying earlier.

Just another way in which most political problems are subjective because they depend on the nigh countless ways you can contextualize the same abstract questions.

And for the record, one example of how your concept of the narrow band of property law that is not coercive is subjective to you is the consistent loggerheads I've hit with libertarians in the past. I would view a monopolization of a natural resource from which employment is drawn, forcing everyone in the area who desires work to work for that one employer monopolizing that resource, to be coercive. I've been explained countless times the libertarian perspective that simply having the freedom to starve and choosing voluntarily to sign up with that employer means it cannot be coercive, but that simply means it is not coercive within the libertarian view of the world. I would say a view more grounded in the material, in practical reality, would have it that having no choice other than death, even if that death is not directly the cause of another human's agency, makes choosing the other option involuntary.

That's not something you can convince me against, and my thinking that way is no more of a received principle than your own. I consider your own view as you stated it no more or less based in reason and logic than my own, they simply represent different ways of seeing the world, different metaphors being used. You use a metaphor emphasizing human interactions, whether another human being is literally forcing another human being to do something in the direct sense. I use a metaphor emphasizing the literal and direct deprivation that is going on, the fact that a person with no options other than do this one thing or starve to death cannot be said to be making a decision free of coercion.

So yes, I would challenge your opinion that people have a natural an unlimited right to own anything previously unclaimed and that any taxation or regulation of that property is inherently coercive. And I would not argue that point, as you would have me do it, on the grounds of arguing against liberty; but instead as, as I believe, my opinion was on the side of liberty and it was your viewpoint that was quite apparent, as it is to me, to be illiberal (anti-liberty).

And it isn't a superficial argument either, some disagreement we only have when broadly interpreting the rights to life and liberty from radically different viewpoints. From my perspective Lockean property rights are a strong argument for the workers of the factory rather than the man who owns the land it was built on as the natural and rightful owners of the place, or of the workers in the mine rather than the man who claimed the previously unclaimed mountain. And when you consider how absurd it is to expect everyone in a society to only vote on opinions they can contextualize in terms of English Enlightenment philosophers, that just goes to show you how one person's liberty is another person's tyranny; which is a great justification for governance by a broad consensus rather than by a single set of opinions.

[Eran]

Actually, the principle justifying a constitution that bans adoption of a state religion is the same one I've been using against the adoption of a state ideology, which is in effect what you are proposing. The same way the liberal constitution allows for majority self-government but not for one majority once to put in a religion that will dominate everyone in the constitutional framework indefinitely, it allows for you or I to vote based on our philosophical views of property ownership but does not provide a basis for either of us putting that into the constitution.

I am very confused. You find analogy between religion and ideology, and I like that. The ideology of today's liberal democracies (not constitutionally enshrined, but majority-determined) includes, for example, ideas about "social justice" to which I am opposed.

You believe it is legitimate for the majority to impose its ideology on the minority (e.g. in forcing the minority to pay for projects that they might oppose). Yet it isn't legitimate for the majority to impose its religion on the minority (e.g. by forcing the minority to subsidise the religion of choice of the majority).

It would be one thing to say that a liberal democracy ought not be allowed to prohibit people from practising their religion of choice. But why shouldn't the majority be allowed to force the minority to pay for the majority's religion, just as it is forced to pay for the majority's ideology?

I would view a monopolization of a natural resource from which employment is drawn, forcing everyone in the area who desires work to work for that one employer monopolizing that resource, to be coercive.

It may be. The allocation of property rights in natural resources is dominated by government fiat, rather than libertarian principles. More often than not, government grants extraction rights to politically-connected individuals or corporations, allowing them, as you say, to dominate an industry, at least within a significant region.

What libertarians should have explained is that under our principles, monopolization of natural resources is much more difficult. Property rights are only assigned based on actual projects (or homesteading) of specific locations. A good example of how that worked is the California Gold Rush. Thousands of people were able to share in the extraction. Contrast that with assignment of oil drilling rights, often restricted to a handful of large corporations.

This is just one example of the many ways that government, collaborating with powerful members of society, acts to restrict the choices available to ordinary people.

Having said that, and having deep sympathy for people whose range of choices is violently curtailed in the interests of a corrupt elite, I think you are exaggerating the level of such curtailment. In practice, every person living in America has a wide range of options available to them. Here is a simple point to consider. There are millions of illegal immigrants working in America today. Every native-born American has several inherent advantages over immigrants - language, culture and legal status. Thus if a poor, skill-less Mexican immigrant can find a job despite having no English and no legal status, so can an American citizen.

Finding a job may require, as it did for that Mexican, relocating or lowering one's standard of living. It is perfectly understandable that people are reluctant to do that. But that reluctance shouldn't be confused with absolute absence of alternatives. The alternative to taking, say, a mining job with a local coal monopoly isn't death.

Unlike some of my libertarian friends, I am a very reasonable person. While I accept the Non Aggression Principle as a guide for the legitimate use of force under normal circumstances, I recognise that exceptions may exist. That under certain circumstances, an exception ought to be made due to an emergency, such as when lives are at stake.

But just as the "ticking bomb" excuse is routinely used to justify torture, so saving lives (the only alternative is death) is routinely used to justify the use of force as a matter of routine.

I'd be very happy if we could accept that in general it is wrong to initiate force against innocent people, and discuss the range of circumstances that justify and exception.

And when you consider how absurd it is to expect everyone in a society to only vote on opinions they can contextualize in terms of English Enlightenment philosophers, that just goes to show you how one person's liberty is another person's tyranny; which is a great justification for governance by a broad consensus rather than by a single set of opinions.

But governance by broad consensus is precisely based on the opinion of English Enlightenment philosophers. As is the (mutually acceptable) notion that even a broad consensus should have its limits.

You can consider my views to be anti-democratic, but you can also view them as natural extensions of the acceptable concept of Constitutional limitation on the scope of legitimate majority action.

[Distracted]

I am very confused. You find analogy between religion and ideology, and I like that. The ideology of today's liberal democracies (not constitutionally enshrined, but majority-determined) includes, for example, ideas about "social justice" to which I am opposed.

You believe it is legitimate for the majority to impose its ideology on the minority (e.g. in forcing the minority to pay for projects that they might oppose). Yet it isn't legitimate for the majority to impose its religion on the minority (e.g. by forcing the minority to subsidise the religion of choice of the majority).

It would be one thing to say that a liberal democracy ought not be allowed to prohibit people from practising their religion of choice. But why shouldn't the majority be allowed to force the minority to pay for the majority's religion, just as it is forced to pay for the majority's ideology?

You're dancing around the point here. You were comparing separation of church in state in a constitution to the idea of enshrining a specific philosophical framework regarding property in a constitution, defending the latter by using the former as an example of a beneficial constitutional limitation on what people can vote for.

My comparison of religion to ideology was comparing the separation of church and state in liberal constitutions to a separation of ideology and state that is implicit in liberal constitutions. Generally liberal democracies allow people to vote on a broad range of different political opinions and ideologies without it coming up against the constitution and requiring some super-majority or so forth. That principle, which you are opposing as illiberal, is consistent with the separation of church and state. If ideology and religion are comparable, they are comparable.

You are trying to confuse the issue by comparing constitutional enshrinement of one set of opinion with a majority voting for a certain thing, which I don't believe are comparable. A majority voting for something is a vindication of the individual, as the law-abiding adult members of a society are all valued as individuals and allowed to weigh in.

The similarity between religion and ideology as we are discussing would have it that a constitutional ban on certain majority opinions conflicting with a specific ideology, as you are proposing as being the liberal or pro-liberty thing to do, would be no different than having no separation of church and state - that is, no different than having a state religion.

In short, it seems obvious to me that enshrining your libertarian views on property in a constitution, protecting that minority from the majority, is no different than enshrining a state religion in a constitution. Those would both operate by the same mechanism, a element of the legal framework limiting majority opinion. Whereas your comparison between a state religion and a majority opinion fails because it is comparing the use of a constitutional limitation on individual opinion to the due exercise of individual opinion.

On a related note, how do you not find your premise you stated earlier (about how an individual in the majority should not count as much as an individual the minority) anti-individualistic? Why should A's opinion suddenly have less individual weight than B's, just because A happened to have the same opinion as C through D? The whole premise for protecting minorities, the idea that they have the right to their opinion, that even if B disagrees with A his opinion should count just as much as they are both individuals, logically necessitates that more individuals supporting one thing than the other should more often than not get their way. Otherwise you are saying that because A-in-the-majority believed in a different thing than B-in-the-minority he is no longer someone whose consent matters as much pound per pound as B's. That goes against the same protection of the individual that necessitates a constitutional framework that protects the right of dissent and minority groups.

[Eran]

You're dancing around the point here. You were comparing separation of church in state in a constitution to the idea of enshrining a specific philosophical framework regarding property in a constitution, defending the latter by using the former as an example of a beneficial constitutional limitation on what people can vote for.

Here is the analogy.

A specific religion = A specific economic ideology
An established church = The majority imposing their economic ideology on the minority
Constitutional separation of church and state = Constitutional prohibition on government to intervene in the economy
The claim that libertarianism implies the imposition of a specific ideology = The claim that separation of church and state implies the imposition of a specific ideology (namely secularism)

A majority voting for something is a vindication of the individual, as the law-abiding adult members of a society are all valued as individuals and allowed to weigh in.

Yet you'd reject this principle if applied to the question of religion. Why?

Why is it more legitimate to force people to pay for, say, green energy, than it is to force them to pay for, say, a state religion?

In short, it seems obvious to me that enshrining your libertarian views on property in a constitution, protecting that minority from the majority, is no different than enshrining a state religion in a constitution

On the contrary. I want to leave the majority's tyranny out of both questions of religion and questions of economics. I want an economics-neutral government just as I want a religion-neutral government.

I want to stop the majority from forcing the minority to subsidies their religion, and I want to stop the majority from forcing the minority to subsides their economic, social or environmental ideologies.

Why should A's opinion suddenly have less individual weight than B's, just because A happened to have the same opinion as C through D?

I could refer again to the question of religion. Or, I could say that a situation in which the majority imposes its ideology (whatever that ideology might be) on individuals is anti-individualist.

Libertarianism is the only political philosophy that rejects the majority's right (although obviously not the majority's power) to impose itself on the minority, even a minority of one.

As a liberal, you are advocating equal political authority to all individuals. But in practice, you are providing some individuals much more power than others. In a truly equal authority, no individual has the authority to impose their will on others. Zero authority. Which means that a collection of individuals still has no authority to impose their will on others. None.