I am certain this has been done before, but I suppose I will start a new thread for this.
I personally have always been a Libertarian.
Minarchism [“night watchman”-ish] → Monarchic Minarchism [no taxes; no violent monopolies on any industry; technically anarcho-capitalism but with a powerless king] → Rothbardian Anarcho-Capitalism
Democrat to moderate libertarian to anarcho-capitalist to Nietzschean anarchism to mutualist to Individualist anarchist/minarchist.
I would like to say though that with the exception of my first step each evolution has retained important elements from the previous one(s)
These threads are always fun. I’ll re-post an edited blog post from 2008:
I am an anarchist. Let me clear away the stereotypes. I am not an angry teenager, I have a career, I have children. I do not want chaos, I want my children and grandchildren to live in the best of all realistically possible worlds. I am not emotionally maladjusted, I have a normal relationship with my parents, I don’t have a problem with authority, having only been fired once (for love!) and my most serious run-ins with the state have been speeding tickets (none in the last five years). I am not an atheist.
The 2000 Presidential election was the first time I was old enough to vote and, as a good Republican, I cast my vote for W. I was raised a small-government conservative and I believed that the Republican party genuinely stood for small-government conservatism since that had been its platform since at least the time of Ronald Reagan. In the eight years which have passed since I first voted, I have seen Federal spending balloon to unprecedented heights. For six years, Republicans controlled both Congress and the Presidency. The Republicans broke record after record for fastest budget growth, largest total Federal budget ever and so on. It became painfully obvious that the Republican Party was using the same recipe the Democrats had used to hold Congress for nearly forty years before 1994: buy the incumbency. But if the party of small government used exactly the same tactics as the Democrat party once they obtained power, instead of using their power to scale back the Federal government, decentralize and delegate power back to the states and so on, then neither party represented small government. The idea of a small government party was a myth created by Republicans to obtain power in the first place. That is, the Republican party talked about small government only because they knew there were a lot of disaffected folks out there who wanted smaller government who would vote for anyone who appeared to be in favor of scaling back government.
Then it struck me that it was a matter of course. Why does someone go into politics except to govern? And once power has been achieved, by whatever means, what incentive is there to scale back one’s own authority? Franklin D. Roosevelt rode his wave of popularity to a lifelong Presidency (think about it). The vast majority of people, if given a groundswell of popular fervor like that which greeted FDR during his Presidency would have made the same choice as FDR - ride it out for as long as it lasts. We all like to imagine that, given the choice, we would not choose like FDR but this is just a symptom of our own narcissism. We love to flatter ourselves on how selfless, giving, and others-oriented we are. When you look at the historical record, and how people actually choose when really faced with the choice between power or self-restraint, the choice, with extremely rare exceptions, is power.
Sometime before Christmas last year, I was at Barnes & Noble and I happened to be looking at the discount books. I noticed a pile of political books and, since I fancy myself a philosopher of religion, politics, etc. I gravitated towards it. One book, Basic Economics, caught my eye both because I had been thinking I needed to better understand how the economy works, and because I noticed its author was Thomas Sowell, who I had heard interviewed on radio and TV on several occasions. I had been impressed with his concise reasoning and no bullshit mentality. I bought the book, hurried home, and started reading voraciously.
As I began reading, I began to have my mind blown by the simplicity and far-reaching consequences of economic philosophy. Sowell’s book has no math equations and does not present a mathematical case for a particular school of economics. Rather, his book makes philosophical arguments about human behavior. The first principle he introduced which thoroughly rewired my way of thinking was this: People tend to do more for their own benefit than for the benefit of others. I have since run into this principle in many different forms. Milton Friedman in an old television interview I saw on YouTube says it this way, People never take care of the property of others as well as they take care of their own property. Or, stated another way (David Friedman, Milton Friedman’s son): People have goals and tend to make the choice among the alternatives facing them which best achieves those goals. When these principles are consistently applied to all people - whether police, government bureaucrats, elected officials, charity workers, clergy or business owners - the change in one’s perspective is revolutionary. I would go so far as to say that, despite finishing a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, I had not really learned to think critically until I began studying economics. I had never learned to analyze the “irrational” choices that other people make which I would not have made in their circumstances. I assigned the “crazy” actions of other people to wickedness, stupidity, ignorance, insanity, corruption or any other number of human maladies. While human behavior is not completely predictable, there are predictable elements to it. By assigning the choices which people make that I don’t understand to irrationality, I was giving up and failing to think critically about why, really why they make the choices they do.
I think part of the reason for this sloppy thinking is what I call the myth of vulgar altruism. We each like to believe we are humble, selfless, self-effacing, giving, altruistic, caring, trustworthy individuals. A biblical example is Jesus’s discussion of the Pharisees who make a pretense of giving, but blow a trumpet before doing so to make sure that everyone around sees how good and laudible they are. This is an obviously self-interested act, since it is motivated by the desire to be perceived in a certain way by others. It is the result of a simple cost-benefit analysis: the benefit of being perceived as good by other people exceeds the cost of the money being deposited into the temple treasury. This hardly seems like true self-sacrifice, giving despite pain and real, net loss to oneself.
To bring this back to the Republican party, I began to think critically about why government had grown more under the Republicans than it had under the Democrats when a vital component of the Republican platform had been to scale back government once they attained power. 9/11 is no excuse for the overall budget growth we’ve seen. The reason, really, is simple: Both Democrats and Republicans have an interest in increasing the size of government. The difference between them is which government programs they champion. That’s it. Since people tend to act more in their own interest (political gain) than in the interests of others (constituency), it is inevitable that elected leaders - whether R or D - will always increase the size and scope of government.
That’s when I realized that there is no hope for limited government. The Libertarian Party and other independents sit on the sidelines waiting for the “some day” when Americans start voting for something other than Republicans or Democrats, but it was clear many years ago that this is futile. There is no political solution to the problem of political government. Government, by virtue of the fact that there is no force which may oppose it, always grows.
So, I began to think about what if there were no government. What would happen? Would chaos ensue? Would we have “nature red in tooth and claw” or the all-against-all jungle predicted by Hobbes? I think the answer, given sufficient qualification, is no. I will try, however, to compress into one sentence the basic reason why it is possible to imagine a realistic (not idealistic), ordered anarchy. The reason is this: The free market can provide all the services which government currently provides to maintain peace, law, order, safety and the public welfare at a lower cost, better quality or both by inducing organizations which perform these services to compete with one another under the constraint of profitability.
Michael Savage conservative (embarrassing I know, but it was early in high school for me) → Ron Paulian → Cato Institutey minarchist → Anarcho-capitalist.
Liberal
Socialist
Communist
Anarcho-Communist
Left Communist
Liberal
Libertarian
Anarcho-Capialist
WOWWW nice save there!
What in the world got you from communist to anarcho-capitalist?
@Eric- To be honest, your biography inspired me to make this thread. xD
@Neodoxy- Ha, I would also like to know the answer to that question. Redwine has a very interesting political past!
I just started becoming less and less authoritarian, and the path naturally leads to anarcho-capitalism
I wrote this a little while ago, detailing my journey. Basically, apathetic → “Ignorant Constitutionalist” → minarchist libertarian → liberal anarchist.
Though I recently convinced myself that nothing good comes from using ‘anarchist’ and that I should stick with ‘polycentrist.’ Names are important!
I too would never use the word anarchist. I would use Libertarian and Rothbardian (or maybe “Market Emergentist”) to describe my stances in any public setting. Now, around family or friends I might use anarcho-capitalist, but I make sure they know what it means.
Always had a free-market view with a bit of an odd stance on decentralization and natural order, but before I started reading books on politics and economics I couldn’t really form it into I needed it to be.
My stance is on the whole free-market, but again an odd mixture of being anarchist among other things. I always push the anarcho-capitalist position in any debate when it’s within the range of discussion, but this is also along side tribal law codes that would be set up in different provinces amongst various monarchs and councils. Essentially, Anglo-Saxon law.
“I just started becoming less and less authoritarian, and the path naturally leads to anarcho-capitalism”
Exactly.
I used to be fairly liberal (mainly because I was ignorant of the human race, and because it sounded great on paper combined with the fact that I had no sense of ethics) and then lost faith in them because I realized it was “always do as they say, not as they do”, then I learned about Dr. Paul for the first time in the GOP debates in early 07, and saw what an honest theologically conservative anarchist he was, and then that changed me to a theologically conservative anarcho-capitalist. Unlike most Anarcho-capitalists, however, I am willing to accept a very minimal state if a minimal state were possible, although it’s not. I could tolerate wasting maybe 2% of my income on police, libertarian legislators, libertarian judges, and libertarian courts, and punishment of people for violating property rights, but that’s pointless and government becomes outright intolerable when you’re paying more than 2% of your income to enforce tyranny..
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I fluctuated between angsty punk anarchist and compassionate left liberal throughout high school and college, but I didn’t really put much thought into it. I read Thoreau my senior year in college and started to consider myself an individualist. I discovered austrian economics, libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism from visiting the anti-state.com forums, and became a full blown Rothbardian and amatuer political philosopher. I’m still an anarcho-capitalist, but not on moral grounds.
Economically I’ve always been a free marketer, I went from a Freidmanite to a Misesian. Not a ahuge leap there, more of a natural progression.
Foreign policy wise I was a neo-con and now I am a pacifist… Go figure
I credit Mises, Rothabrd, and Hayek for my progreesion into pacifism, but guys like Thoreau, Emerson, Spooner, Tolstoy, Darrow really took me over the edge.
My young punk days is why I still like the word Anarchist, even though I wasn’t truly an Anarchist back then. I just like being the anti conformist rock n roll rebel and thought anarchism was about dyed hair, torn clothes, and spray painting Circled A on private property.
I was pretty much an idiot until I went to work and started aquiring my own earned property. I discovered Libertarianism accidently on the internet and out of curiosity I got interested. I’m on a much clearer path now even though I still have plenty to learn.
Hey LibertarianCowboy, at least you were a relatively consistent anarchist unlike the ones in Greece protesting over government spending cuts
I used to be basically a classical liberal/right-libertarian.
I’ve always disliked both corporations and government. For awhile I thought that meant I was a moderate. Heh.
I was apathetic for most of my life. In 2000, with the presidential elections looming I felt the social pressure/peer pressure to vote. I voted for the Green Party/Ralph Nader because it was the only party/platform opposing the death penalty. Over the next 4 years I realized that people should be left alone, and I read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell (thanks, Grandpa). I was a small-government libertarian without realizing it. I voted Republican because they seemed to talk-the-talk on economic issues of non-intervention, which I decided were ultimately more important. I reasoned that I would rather live in an opressive society (militarist, sexist, theocratic) with a high standard of living than a liberal society where everyone is poor. After the 2008 election, I stumbled across Lewrockwell.com and from there I learned about libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism (and mises.org). I read Economics In One Lesson, Human Action, The State, Man, Economy And State, For A New Liberty, and other books of the Austrian school. I prefer the anarcho-capitalist appellation despite the possible negative reactions (or in spite of them). I am not trying to win any friends and if someone makes conclusions about me without examining the actual content of my position then they are someone who cannot think for themselves. Let them rot, I say. Political economy requires critical thought.