Grew up on a farm. Individualism and the family unit was all there was in my world in northern NH. Rooted for the Quebecois. We all hated government, it was a dirty word.
Then in JR High I found Emerson and Thoreau in some books at a library book sale and found myself agreeing with them, life was good.
Then I went to college for Zoology and while the science courses were good, the GENERIC education classes made me feel like either I was evil or the rest of the world was insane. This largely lead me further down the individualistic path philosophically and I’ve always tried to avoid the state.
Finally, I got XM radio and heard this voice, this clear, clarion voice that I kept agreeing with much like Emerson or Thoreau… Mr. Tom Woods. This lead me to Mises.Org and MisesMedia (the you tube channel).
I have finally found a home here, snuggling up every night with Bastiat or Mises or Hayek or Rothbard.
Basically I was raised on right-wing talking points. My dad always listened to Michael Savage (although now he prefers Levin) and he made sure that he taught me the glories of the military, the United States, etc. When I became an atheist in 10th grade or so after watching Richard Dawkins appear on the O’Reilly Factor (it made me question religion after never analyzing theistic arguments and I just decided later that week that, ‘huh, I’m not a theist anymore’), I dropped my judgmental attitude about personal behavior. I figured it was pretty rational to stop going around caring about personal habits when it doesn’t affect me in any meaningful sense. It was obvious to me that things that deserve judgment are things that hinder other people who didn’t ask for such hindrances. So I kept the economic ideas and discarded the “cultural values” ideas.
So my atheism was basically dormant for two years or so, and then I started to really get annoyed with theism. It’s a distaste I still have to this day, although it isn’t quite as immature as it was then. So I really became one of those obnoxious Youtube anti-theists that think they are smart and sciency by mere virtue of disowning religion. Then I came into contact with the more sophisticated arguments for theism and I stumbled across the Moral Argument. It’s not that I think the argument is sound, but I really started questioning moral ontology. So I did a few Youtube searches for moral nihilism and stumbled across the nihilist/Austrians on Youtube. I was still a Cato Institutey libertarian at the time, but after watching Fringe Elements and Spawktalk, I was then turned on to the Mises Institute and Rothbard and all of that. I had heard of the Austrians in passing and through Ron Paul, but was surprised to see that these nihilists on Youtube I happened to stumble across were also libertarians. For the record, I’m not quite a nihilist right now, although I lean somewhat their way.
Phaedros and Stephen Adkins, how do you address these?
I had it all laid out (brilliantly i promise). Then I accidentally clicked on refresh and lost it all. It would’ve blown your mind . If I feel like it later I’ll retype it up.
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?
JH,
Those little thought experiments are my favorite portion of that chapter. The way I tended to address them in the past was to take them to heart and abandon all hope of building any defense for libertarianism based on simple slogans or Natural Rights Theory.
One attractive thing about the utilitarian approach, as Friedman notes, is that it actually provides you a way of answering questions of what the law ought to be. You simply can’t do that with simple principles like “everyone has the absolute right to control his own property, provided that he does not use it to violate the corresponding rights of others” as I think his laser example illustrates.
Of course, utilitarianism has its own problems. And even though I no longer consider myself a utilitarian, I think there are worse ways of determining political courses of action. But that’s just all my opinion.
Became heavily involved in atheology (I run asktheatheists.com). Through this I got a taste for logical rigour, and the necessity of applying critical thought to all assumptions.
A subscriber to my youtube channel pointed me to a video entitled ‘the state is a death threat’ (no longer online as far as I can see, created by youtube user called fringeelements) which simply laid out how law, and thus the power of the state, ultimately depends on the threat of deadly force. After that, I sought out and read a whole bunch of anti-statist material, much of it hosted by mises.org.
In 2010 I made the pro-liberty propaganda animation George Ought to Help, hoping to encourage others down a similar path. I currently self-identify as a market anarchist.
Lib-Dem (I think because it fit in with my Church of England upbringing - i.e. everything to everyone)
‘Distributist’ - Binary Economics (The idea of a non-coercive worker-ownership appealed to both my de-centralist and small-s socialist tendencies)
Mutualism ala Kevin Carson (An Austrian critique of Binary Economics led me away from BE, and ‘left-libertarianism’ was a comfortable fall-back position that allowed me to retain some of the same values but without an uncomfortable degree of cognitive dissonance. Also, I read a book by Ricardo Semler that convinced me that industrial demoacracy could occur within a free-market).
I am now toying with Post-Keynesian ideas such as Steve Keen writes about. His critique of neo-classical economics has had a big impact on me, and (although this will be denied by followers of the Austrian School) I think that some of these criticisms apply to particular aspects of AE. As a result I am beginning to doubt left-libertarian ideas.
Alongside this I am also heavily interested in Complexity and Systems Theory, and whilst I do not have any fully formed opinions, I think this interest is going to influence my economic beliefs.
Essentially I am always open to new knowledge and understanding but I still have an emotional attatchment to worker-ownership and workplace democracy.
Yes, so was I, and I remained one until I was about seven, when they sent me to school… I was very, very confused for a long time, until I started reading the books that I should have read in the first place, and I was able to become much more consistent in my views. I’ve always had a libertarian streak, though. Even if it was very, very inconsistent at times, not to mention ignorant of economic realities. Party politics is largely an ethnic thing in this country, so it’s not like I ever identified with a local politician very strongly. I remember being very impressed when I first heard about Dr Ron Paul in America, about five or six years ago, even though I wasn’t really very aware of libertarianism in America back then.
I always had the impression that the “extremes” of left and right were both utterly mad and that the truth must lie elsewhere… It was only quite recently that I realised it was a completely false dichotomy, and that the truth isn’t anywhere near that particular spectrum at all.
I remember being about seven years old, at the grocery store, convinced I had come up with a revolutionary thought: “money is weird.” I couldn’t wrap my head around why people use it. Why couldn’t I just take what I need from the grocery store, and promise not to take more? Wouldn’t that work? Why do we exchange little pieces of paper? I guess that means I had socialist leanings, but I’m not ashamed - I was just a kid. What are adult socialists’ excuses?
I also remember being endlessly baffled trying to figure out whether the price of seasonal items (say pumpkins) would be higher or lower in season. After all, more people want them, but then again, there are more of them. “Hmm, I wonder if there is a field of study dedicated to these questions. Probably not, I’m a genius.”
I went to a catholic high school and had to do a report on third party politics, this was in 2005ish, and I was given the Libertarian Party. My presentation went something like this: Libertarians believe that as long as you don’t harm anyone you can do whatever you wish, with your life. For example they think it’s ok to shot up heroin in your home while not damaging anyone’s property or bodies. My teacher interrupted me and called this idea silly; I looked back at her and asked why? She didn’t respond. I wouldn’t have called myself a libertarian then, but I was. I argued with my History teacher senior year about a detention, I told her she didn’t have the authority to tell me what to do with my body, she disagreed. I told her the only reason she has any authority is because I solely gave it to her, and I could easily take it back, she disagreed. All the while I was arguing with my father over invading Iraq, he was a Neo-Con Dubya fan, and called me a bleeding heart liberal, I told him that we don’t have the right to invade a country that didn’t attack us; he argued they did by default when they wouldn’t allow UN nuclear inspectors. About 6 months later I got him turned onto Ron Paul, now he’s a libertarian. It wasn’t until my 2nd year out of high school that I identified myself as a Libertarian, I was sitting in a Philosophy 101 class and we were talking about political philosophy when it hit me, that I was a libertarian. I found The Law, and the rest was history.
That’s a really great story. How exactly did your neocon father end up supporting Paul? That sounds more uncommon than most. What was it that made him come around??
He went and took my views seriously, looked them up and found Paul. Did a little more research on him and found there was more truth in him than Bush. He voted for Bush to limit the government and just didn’t relies he expanded it with wars and terrorism, something I feel is common among his generation Republican’s. It took about a year, and as I said I wasn’t a Paul supporter, I didn’t know who he was even.
That’s awesome. You’re lucky to have a father who is that intellectually honest (i.e. is actually a truth seeker). A couple of books on the subject of the neocon interpretation of “conservatism” are:
Bounced around a lot of obscure 19th century political theories in college before more or less settling on being a liberal. However, I still can’t stand being around other liberals.
Grew up in a Fox News watching conservative household. I didn’t think much about the foreign policy side (“They hate us for our freedom!!! Spread democracy!”) and didnt’ have an understanding on economics. After watchign Bill O’Reilly so many times I grew tired of his attitude towards his guests who disagreed with him, then went on Youtube and stumbled upon The Young Turks. After that I became a left-wing liberal (Tax the rich to pay for public schools, healthcare, roads since they have billions that would not be used anyways, Legalize gay marriage). I became an atheist since then and ventured from different youtubers until I landed on one channel which happened to have Anti-Statist material with a video called “The Statist Tea Party’”. I did not know what the terms were all about or even the context of regulation during a disaster. Along that time period I stumbled upon Milton Friedman videos from the channel LibertyPen I would not have learned about free market economics. As for my interest in Ron Paul, it came from an anti-war Moxnews channel where users kept spamming “Ron Paul 2012!”. I gained the philosphical arguments against big government and learned of ‘individual liberty’. To be honest it was RP’s argument of “The federal government shouldn’t have a say in marriage, leave it to the consenting of the individuals or the states if they have to” got to me (not at first since I feared theocratic states in the South but after time went on I learned that a marriage license is nothing more than a way of saying “Your union is now valid because the federal government recognized it”). Also I listened to Thomas Sowell who argued against minimum wage and presented arguments which debunk affirmative Action/welfare after watching his segment on Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose”.
Eventually I identified as anti-state/an-cap after being convinced that ‘taxation is theft’ and ‘The State is an entity that has a monopoly on violence’ all thanks to a fringeelements youtube channel. After reading material from the Mises Institute I became interested in learning economics on how it grows (I read Irwin Schiff’s cute comic and listened to podcasts from Peter Schiff). My friends at university call me weird since I have views on how ‘democracy is violence’ since they feel that problems can be solved by having a majority vote (marriage, wealth re-distribution etc). I still have a lot to learn though, especially on Intellectual Property. I used material from Stephen Kinsella but had trouble during a discussion to address people who feel they have a right to all earnings from intangible material (Digitized music, newspapers etc) they spent time/money producing whether someone directly copies without paying for the service or permission to use.
Constitutional government > minarchism > my current position which I call “Stateless minarchism” or “pseudo-State minarchism”
("Stateless minarchism is the idea that a non-State organization, which functions very much like an ultra-minimal State sans coercion, could achieve a natural monopoly in the provision of legal services, and thereby assure libertarian law going forward better than could a competitive market in legal services - think of it as an anchor trying to keep a free society from drifting away from libertarian ethics)
My motives were originally aesthetic. I hated public school, the arbitrary authority but especially the sense that the goal of the school was to reduce everyone to a very low common denominator. I read Harrison Bergeron and Anthem and lots of European history. Then I started to rebel, got into French surrealist poetry, beat poetry, Nietzsche and other skeptical philosophy, the Doors, and the “extracurriculars” which one would expect to accompany someone on a trip like this…and that’s when I started gradually demolishing all of my assumptions about politics and everything else - and I’ve never looked back. This attitude was the foundation of my libertarianism, but it was basically philosophical in character, rather than political or economic.
It wasn’t until college that I started studying Austrian economics in any depth, or started really thinking about political theory in a systematic way (which, by the way, had nothing to do with actually being in college - I just happened to be there when the interest struck me). It was during this period of time that I became a minarchist, and then eventually a “Stateless minarchist” as described above.
I’ve been batting around the idea that this is one of the (practical) roles that religion plays in society. I think the “religion = violent superstition” canard put forward by the Dawkins/Dennett/Harris crowd is a ridiculous over-simplification.
But I don’t think that we need or want a monopoly on law services in order to keep a society from becoming anti-libertarian. I think this is the role of culture. Language, art, music, fiction, theater, religious worship, festivals, and so on are the fabric in which the law exists as a woven strand. I don’t want monolithic law for the same reason I don’t want monolithic language, art, music, fiction, theater, etc.
But I don’t think that we need or want a monopoly on law services in order to keep a society from becoming anti-libertarian. I think this is the role of culture. Language, art, music, fiction, theater, religious worship, festivals, and so on are the fabric in which the law exists as a woven strand. I don’t want monolithic law for the same reason I don’t want monolithic language, art, music, fiction, theater, etc.
The majority demanding bad art doesn’t hurt you - the majority demanding bad law does.
But anyway, I’m not against libertarianism having a cultural basis, that would be silly, I just want it to have in addition an institutional basis, because institutions provide a degree of continuity and stability absent in their absence. There are many kinds of institutions which could potentially fulfill this role. Educational institutions, religious institutions (if you wanted to go the route of creating a libertarian religion)…any number of kinds, including the civic or governmental (but non-State) institution, as I propose. Since law is the issue, since law is what I would like to see tethered somewhat so it cannot drift with ephemeral cultural trends, it seems that the best way to tether the law is with an institution that deals directly in law - but I’d of course encourage organizations which indirectly promoted libertarian law through education or whatever other methods.
No real convicitons or concerns, ever (even now); other than when I was younger I had a deep intuition that much of the left was very annoying, very silly, or ultra- destructive and was always more in control of propaganda than the right ever was, or could be.
I don’t know (or care) if I am an anarchist or not : but to even consider anarchy takes a bit of a twist in the head if one is not attrcated to bohemian flavors of the week, as the position is almost out of anyone’s thought process. I wonder if my personality may have been suceptible to anarchy due to my love for “anarchic” humor like The Marx Bros, Monty Python, Hard Days Night, Looney Tunes, screwball comedies, The Goons, Animaniacs, etc?
. If I feel like it later I’ll retype it up.