Many conservatives are frustrated with our society's lack of acceptance of conservatism into the mainstream. But it's not because of Republican Party weakness or a failure in political strategy, as some conservatives such as Steve Deace suggest on talk radio and among the Internet and TV pundit class.

The problem is because conservatives have abandoned the true moral principles underlying a civilized society: private property, free exchange, and individual liberty.

Starting about a century ago conservatives began to surrender their moral principles to the progressives' collectivist schemes, including the income tax, FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Great Society and the idea of "civil rights." Even before the 20th century a child's education was usurped from parents, and conservatives have accepted government schooling, or government-authorized private schooling, ever since.

Many people have been conditioned, however, to rationalize those kinds of compulsory government schemes.

In the conservatives' caving to progressive ideology for a century, they have obediently accepted the income tax, which is a form of institutionalized theft.

Compulsory taxation is theft because it is involuntary. The government uses threats against the people to coerce them to forfeit a certain amount of their income to bureaucrats.

In contrast, the private producers and businesses of society must depend on the voluntary payments to them by consumers for goods and services. If it is immoral of businessmen to demand payments involuntarily (in which case the businessmen would be called "gangsters," or "thugs"), then it is immoral for anyone to do that.

No one should be above the law when it comes to the basic rule of society against theft. For a moral society to flourish the people need to be civilized. And a truly civilized society would not allow its government (or the people themselves) to commit theft and plunder, or to even have an apparatus in place to enable the bureaucrats to forcibly seize the people's wealth and property.

Involuntary governmental taxation of the people's wealth and property and mandatory reporting of private information are what enable and empower the Lois Lerners and her IRS comrades to persecute conservative and Tea Party groups, for example.

If we didn't have the income tax, then FDR and LBJ's intrusive and destructive New Deal and Great Society programs probably could not have been passed and funded. (Could the activists possibly get enough people to fund those programs voluntarily?)

Conservatives have naively accepted those schemes, including Social Security, the government's own compulsory retirement and medical coverage racket.

Privacy is another issue that relates to the immorality of compulsory taxation and government social schemes. The government demands private, personal information from you, where you work, how much you earn, what investments you have, or how many people the businesses employ and how much the employers pay the workers, information that is none of government bureaucrats' business.

If your private information is none of your neighbors' business, then it is none of the government's business, in my view.

It is sad that conservatives are getting behind a known left-liberal progressive for president such as Donald Trump, who has donated thousands upon thousands of dollars to big government Democrats, and who promises progressive central planning health care schemes and all the rest.

All the increased spending Trump wants to impose is the opposite of what the country needs to restore our freedom. Unfortunately, Trump does not seem to understand that the government is not a business. It's government, a forced monopoly on the people. And regardless of his purported tax-cut plan, the money with which he wants to spend in the trillions is other people's money, taken from them involuntarily. Like most politicians, Trump seems to show contempt for free markets, private property, and privacy.

Private property and private property rights are very important aspects of a civilized society. But conservatives do not seem to realize how their abandonment of private property has greatly contributed to the cultural decline that many of them have been complaining about.

Conservatives have also joined the progressive activists in further damaging the moral principle of private property rights in their acceptance of "civil rights" legislation.

Of course, it is politically incorrect to point this out, but the 1964 Civil Rights Act (and subsequent "civil rights" legislation) should only have addressed the right of all people access to public property and government-run functions such as the public schools, city parks, and buses, and so on. 

When addressing "public accommodations" in civil rights legislation, the inclusion of privately-owned establishments such as hotels and restaurants was the progressives' way of further usurping control from private property owners. It also empowered members of certain protected classes to forcibly enter private property against the will of the property's owners.

And is it a big surprise that the list of the government's protected classes continues to expand?

Many conservatives are rightfully worried about society's cultural decline.

But would we have to deal with gender-confused individuals threatening to invade the other sex's bathroom if it weren't for the aggressive empowerment of certain protected classes, in the name of "civil rights"?

Would we have lesbian couples getting away with suing Christian bakers who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding? In the modern era, "civil rights" necessitates the infringement of private property rights.

And would we have college cupcakes running amok and censoring conservative speakers and expelling "microaggressors" were it not for government-run universities and government-financed private universities which rely on taxes taken involuntarily from America's workers and producers?

And would there be so much promiscuity among today's youths without the tax-funded governmental promotions of "sexual liberation" and abortion-on-demand?

The real solutions for those examples of cultural decay include abolishing the immoral institutionalized plunder of taxation and the entire system of redistributionism which makes such societal degeneration possible, and restoring private property rights as the American founders had intended.

But do the conservative talk radio crowd and pundits ever consider these solutions? Alas, apparently not.

Conservatives spend a lot of time promoting their social agenda. But, unfortunately, conservatives seem to erroneously believe that using the progressives' taxation and bureaucracy apparatus to promote their social agenda is actually morally legitimate and practical. They do not seem to understand the necessity of private property and private property rights for such social traditions to flourish.

Further, instead of conservatives advocating the dismantling of governmental intrusions and usurpations which violate private property rights, most of the discussion and activism on the part of conservatives has been a matter of defensive political strategy.

Oh, we have to donate to this or that candidate to keep the Senate a Republican majority. (So the Republicans can continue expanding the welfare state, of course.)

Or we have to vote for this or that presidential candidate because he might appoint better Supreme Court Justices, we hope, cross our fingers. (See John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter on the value of this form of defensive election strategy.)

In the end, defensive election strategizing doesn't work, it seems to me.

Instead of continuing to accept the progressives' immoral governmental apparatus of theft, plunder, trespass, and invasiveness, the conservatives might consider dismantling it altogether.

Scott Lazarowitz is a social and cultural conservative who follows a libertarian political and economic philosophy. Please visit his blog.