I was born an anarchist.
It would be cool if some folks would explain what it was they actually changed their minds about. Did their underlying philosophy change or just their perceptions of the effectiveness of state interventions? Did you come to believe state action was “just wrong” in some moral sense? Or did you just come to believe that they rarely achieved their stated goals (that they were not, on the whole, welfare enhancing)?
Personally, I grew much more liberal (in a classical sense) between 2002 and 2006 (though kind of without realizing it), even though my underling utilitarian philosophy did not change. I started college as a member of the campus greens, but gradually drifted away after 1) reading Friedman, Hayek, and Buchanan 2) seeing how poorly the Bush administration operated. Both factors combined led me to doubt the effectiveness of state action as a practical matter in most (but not all) cases (even though I had no principled objection to state action per se). Of course, my politics and philosophy have changed a bit since then as well (e.g. I wouldn’t label myself a utilitarian anymore).
Republican,
Conservative Republican,
Milton Friedman-follower (which I defined as limited government to carry out police, courts, national defense - i was undecided about Freidman’s role for a central bank),
Anarcho-capitalist (very recently) - reading some pieces by Hans Hoppe has convinced me that the arguments in support of free markets hold true regardless of the industry/good/service in question
The main thing that changed my mind was to ask myself: “under what circumstances is it OK to take property from someone (who rightfully owned it) against his or her will?” My honest answer to that question is that there are no circumstances making it OK. And further, whenever someone tries to tell me that the end-goals of X, Y, Z (police force, education, healthcare, etc) are the ONLY ones that make it ok to take property from someone, I then realize that anywhere someone draws the line is arbitrary and the arguments supporting expropriation for one end-goal vs. another are never any stronger or weaker than each other (in fact, they are typically backwards - to support government funded schools but not government funded grocery stores is illogical).
So, like you said, I have come to believe that state action is “just wrong” in the moral sense.
To quote a recent Forbes article: “Why are forced labor and slavery wrong? It is not because they are costly, or because they are economically inefficient. They would be wrong even if they were inexpensive and efficient. No: They are wrong because other people’s time, talents, and treasure do not belong to you. You do not own other people. Neither, therefore, do you own the fruits of their labor. They do.”
Another way of looking at this was to try and explain to myself how expropriation/taxation follow the golden rule of “do to other as you would do to them.” I couldn’t do it. I now come to the conclusion that anything other than voluntarism is in violation of the golden rule. How could anyone claim that our current system of forced taxation for public school (or public anything) is in accordance with the golden rule? Taxation involves the use of force, and the use of force breaks the golden rule.
It’s kind of a two-pronged thing for me. To my utter shame, I was at one time a FOX-watching, baby-eating neocon. I thought that since the US was the most powerful country in the world, we had a duty to be “good stewards” of our position and exercise a kind of benevolent imperialism over the rest of the world. I cringe even as I write this. Anyway, Bush definitely was the catalyst for my repudiation of mainstream conservatism.
What started me on the journey out of conservatism was when I started reading Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics. His book primarily focuses on showing how government projects rarely achieve what they set out to achieve. In fact, they often achieve the very opposite (e.g. rent control). But this fact itself belies a bigger question… why are governments so bad at achieving their goals? After all, a government is just an organization. Corporations are also organizations and they tend to be very good at achieving their goals. You could argue it’s just how they are organized but this doesn’t make sense because all governments are pretty bad at achieving their own goals, however they are organized. And governments copy organizational ideas from the private sector but to no avail.
The answer to the problem is enlightening. First, governments aren’t spending their own money. So, they have very little incentive to be efficient. Second, (Sowell didn’t address this) governments are self-interested just like anybody else. Wal-Mart doesn’t stock its shelves out of love for me. Wal-Mart stocks its shelves to make its board of directors and other shareholders richer. So why should I believe the government polices the roads or regulates electricity out of love for me? It just doesn’t make any sense. And if the government isn’t doing it out of a love for me, then why are they doing it? Well, for pretty much the same reason that Wal-Mart is doing it… to make the politicians and their financial backers richer. So, that explains why government is so poor at achieving its goals… we haven’t rightly assessed what the government’s goals are to begin with! The government doesn’t care about keeping the roads safe. It cares about collecting tolls and fines. The government doesn’t care about my electrical safety. It cares about regulating the electrical monopolies and collecting taxes on every kilowatt-hour of electricity I use. Looked at in this light, the government is stunningly adept at achieving its goals. The key is to rightly assess what its goals are.
But realizing that Santa Claus and fairies don’t exist leads naturally to the final question - if government is just another rapaciously self-interested organization imbued with the power to club anyone over the head that gets in its way, how in the hell can this be good? Isn’t that just evil? It is evil. There’s no redeeming value in government whatsoever. It is naught but organized crime dressed in a judge’s robe. So, that’s how I ended up anti-State.
Clayton -
I went from Savage (haha) to Conspiracy to Paul to Rothbard, then back to Paul. I don’t like political labels. I’m a person who wants to rid the world of central banking.
From freedom to fascism woke me up to the FED and i went straight to Ron Paul where i found mises.org. Got Rothbard and Boetie, then Bastiat, then Hayek and Nock, etc.
'08 crash: I asked my poly sci professor what happened. He had no idea. Ron Paul seemed to make sense since he was saying that the opposite of what everyone else was saying is true. Turns out that was pretty close.
The main thing that changed my mind was to ask myself: “under what circumstances is it OK to take property from someone (who rightfully owned it) against his or her will?”
JH2011,
I’m not questioning your personal political path (as I think those sorts of discussions would turn this thread sour). But might I recommend checking out David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. He is also an anarcho-capitalist, but he openly questions whether those sorts of simple arguments in favor of libertarianism are all that convincing. Specifically, see this chapter:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freedom/MofF_Chapter_41.html
Of course, it will be up to you to decide whether his arguments are all that convincing. I just wanted to make sure you, as someone fresh to the anarcho-capitalist space, were aware of this work.
The biggest spur in motivating me to change over to anarcho-capitalism was the Mises daily article “Ten Reasons Not to Abolish Slavery.” I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it: http://mises.org/daily/5076/Ten-Reasons-Not-to-Abolish-Slavery
I realized that when I pushed statists on why the government should be able to use violence to extort money like the mafia (the youtube video “George Ought to Help” was really useful too), they always ended up resorting to one of the ten reasons in the article that were used to defend slavery. I realized I needed to stand up for liberty and what is right regardless of my reservations. After a bit of reading I began (and still am) becoming more and more confident with how an anarchist society would work.
I was originally convinced by both the utilitarian and moral arguments against statism. Both of these were slowly repealed. Eventually when I came to the realization that morality was subjective I dropped this reason and my utilitarian arguments started to wain. I fell into Nietzscheanism for a while and passed it by. Since this I’ve pretty much accepted that there are certain services which are unlikely to be provided by the market in the current situation and there are some government programs which can outperform free market services in just about any situation that’s likely to occur in our day (though I believe that there are currently states of affairs which would result in the government being outperformed by the market in these services). A large part of what helped me to determine this was by looking, not only more deeply into non-austrian schools of thought, but also further into Austrianism itself.
If there was a rep button on this forum I’d give you some for this. It’s really refreshing to see people help others to develop their views even if they don’t agree with them… I turned an anarcho-communist onto Emma Goldman the other day 
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I’m not questioning your personal political path (as I think those sorts of discussions would turn this thread sour). But might I recommend checking out David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. He is also an anarcho-capitalist, but he openly questions whether those sorts of simple arguments in favor of libertarianism are all that convincing. Specifically, see this chapter:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freedom/MofF_Chapter_41.html
Of course, it will be up to you to decide whether his arguments are all that convincing. I just wanted to make sure you, as someone fresh to the anarcho-capitalist space, were aware of this work.
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That chapter wasn’t anything that isn’t regularly discussed already. In fact, I feel as though I became dumber just for having read it.
I have to agree here. I haven’t yet gotten around to reading anything by David Friedman, but I’ve always wanted to. Now having read that chapter I feel like it’s a lot less likely that I ever will.
I have to apologize for being a little harsh, sorry.
I turned an anarcho-communist onto Emma Goldman the other day
haha too cool.
PS*
oth of these were slowly repealed. Eventually when I came to the realization that morality was subjective I dropped this reason and my utilitarian arguments started to wain. I fell into Nietzscheanism for a while and passed it by.
Ha! This sounds very similar to my experiences, post-2006, grappling with moral philosophy. I flirted with ethical naturalism when questioning utilitarianism, but I have come to accept Hume’s idea that ethical statements do not contain meaningful propositions and instead express emotional responses. Which for a while made me very skeptical of prevailing moral schemes, which is prob why i was attracted to nietzche. Now, I am struggling with the work of simon blackburn’s quasi-realism. sigh but who knows where that will take me.
really, i don’t know what the heck i “believe”. i think i have only learned one big lesson. and not so much learned a lesson but picked up a useful attitude that applies to both politics and philosophy: distrust certainty both in yourself and others. there’s almost always a reason to doubt what you think is the Truth, if you’re willing to look for it.
My answer might be quite interesting. After I lost to libertarians in economic debates (I were leftist and they showed me statistics of how Third World-countries rose from starvation to their current development, like China, India and South Korea) I became quite ‘moderate’ free trade supporter, who liked public education etc. But maybe because I were teenager (15 or 16), more radical political positions started to interest me. I saw minarchism and especially anarcho-capitalism as a really radical and started to sympathize them. Their radicalism was quite addictive for a youngster and finally I was dragged in. Maybe this is something useful? Radicalism for the youth!
I was a common right wing guy all my life (until i was 23 or so) with emphasis in economic freedom. Then I learnt enough english to listen to english youtube videos of Milton Friedman’s Free to choose series and Ron Paul videos. When the crisis came i listened much to what Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers and Marc Faber had to say. From that I began a journey to Mises and austrian economics which led my to Huerta de Soto and Hoppe. More than anything else I am now a Hoppean.
Social Democratic with nationalist leanings-> miniarchist-> libertarian/voluntarist (this transformation spans about 20 years)
Student,
Thanks Student, I appreciate you sending this. I have not read it yet, but will do so soon and I’ll use my own judgment as to the strength of his arguments. Even if I don’t find these particularly convincing, I hope I can make it a point to be aware of when I am relying on very simple arguments to defend libertarianism, and more importantly, determine if i’ve put the simple arguments through enough questioning. But I must admit, I think it is arguments like this that can be most convinving. And i don’t want to start thinking that because an argument is simple, then that is enough to not believe it.
As for my own personal (and recent) attractive to libertarianism/anarcho capitalism, I haven’t read a lot of the major works by Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe, etc which appear to be widely read by users here. I have spent more of my past reading Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Peter Schiff, and Milton Friedman, plus his Free to Choose series. I recently read Rothbard’s What Has Govt Done to Our Money and a few articles/speeches by Hans Hoppe. As I start to read more things by Rothbard and Hoppe, I am finding they are even more convincing than Sowell or Friedman.
Those authors you mentioned are good as a primer, but to me they can be a little watered down. Honestly a guy llke Sowell is just writing for a different audience than Hoppe or Rothbard. I remember For a New Liberty being a huge turning point in my thinking, and if I remember correctly I had just read Basic Economics and Free to Choose not long before.
Student, I’ve now read this chapter. I think his arguments on the military draft and his arguments about doing anything which results in some probability of injuring another person requiring his/her are weak. However, I’m having a tough time dealing with his scenarios about shining a laser at someone’s door vs. turning on a lamp in your window. Or the scenario with the madman and the rifle. How do you address these?
Phaedros and Stephen Adkins, how do you address these?