I used to be a standard neocon; I loved Neal Boortz and Sean Hannity, supported Bush, and I even had the audacity to call myself “libertarian” because I didn’t agree with the war on drugs.
I hated leftists, but it was actually a leftist’s argument that changed my mind. I was perusing the Internets and saw a transcript of a leftist and a rightist debating universal healthcare. I was eager to see the rightist win. The leftist said something like, “if the role of government is to protect its citizens from harm, what’s so different about having a military than having a universal healthcare system?”. I was stumped. I knew I wanted a tax-funded military, and knew I certainly didn’t want anarchy, but I couldn’t figure out the flaw in the leftist’s argument.
Some time later, I was debating a leftist online about taxes, and I found myself comparing taxes to theft. The leftist responded, “How do you think we should fund the military?”. At that point, I had the opportunity to backtrack slightly, or at least clarify. I chose to become libertarian!
Last year, my sophmore year in highschool, I was listening to Rush and Mark Levin everyday. I too was a neocon. However, I was “driven over the edge” by the Iraq war. I initially was for the war, and truly believed that the government had the right to send the U.S Army oversees in the name of democracy. Last year though, I began to question the war and the reasons for waging it in the first place. I have always been against the war on drugs, welfare and taxation, but what drove me to libertarianism was swithcing my position on war and forign policy. It was actually my dad who has been a long time mises reader (not the forums, just Mises Institute sponsored books) who introduced me to this site. I pretty much spend every second of my free time here so now he regrets showing me; ) Anyway, thats what drove me to libertarianism and minarchism.
Hoppe and Rand jointly did. I used to be a right-wing monarchist, so Hoppe’s book DTGTF caught my attention… I was transformed after reading it. Rand’s The virtue of Selfishness completed the process.
I began to really become libertarian after I was introduced to the non-aggression principle, and I was “driven” by a need for my beliefs to be logically and morally consistent. I was basically a market anarchist (with some blurry areas) before I read any literature on the subject, but reading Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty nailed the coffin shut on any remnants of statism left in me.
On “Scooby Doo” the criminal awlays refers to his plan as being perfect and that the kids (and thier dog) are the only reason they got caught. I was reading Что делать and thinking about perfecting socialism when I heard that familiar line, when it suddenly occoured to me that the government was the criminal and that rioters/dissenters/anarchists/Americans were the kids. Perfect plans such as Stalin’s pay too much attention to human suffering (Modern Democrats) and perfecting the State (Modern Republicans) and completely ignore what it means to be human and actually live in a society. I realized that if you only care about how a society runs and ignore how the people live then you have missed much more than half the picture. God knows that a million and one things in America illegal and that a million and one things happen anyway.
So yeah, the old wall was broken by Joe Ruby, Ken Spears, Iwao Takamoto, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. The spot where the old wall was simply has a sign that says “Don’t build a wall here”. Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell are primarily responsible for the distribution of the signs.
PS:I am by-the-way schizophrenic and that is why I need multiple signs distributed for one metphorical (1D) spot where the (2D) wall was in my (3D) world.
I was hanging out on the Navajo reservation and one day heard Russell Means speak. He mentioned running for the presidential nomination for the Libertarian Party so I checked them out. Ron Paul got the nomination that year.
I was interested in anarchy before that and in primitivism, which is why I was on the reservation. Anyway, that is how I was introduced to libertarianism.
Neocon->Conservative for civil liberties->Randian->Anarcho Capitalism
A seven year long road, and I have reached the end. It was the contradictions of modern Conservatives and eventual basic knowledge in economics that led me here.
I didn’t know what I was for the longest time. I think I’ve always believed in limited government because as a kid I really liked reading stuff the Founders wrote. For a time I dabbled with socialism, mainly because I believed universal healthcare was a good idea. But the more I read, and the more I looked I soon came to see that socialism and freedom can’t co-exist. I started to read more John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and soon found the Alex Jones Radio Show (yeah I’m one of those guys). From the Alex Jones show I was introduced to Ron Paul (yeah, I liked Ron Paul before it was cool). While searching for Ron Paul stuff online I stumbled upon Lew Rockwell.com and that lead me to to the Mises Institute. That was born, really out of my desire to understand economics more. I’m not good with math but I like economics even if I don’t understand formulas and things such as that. As I read more about Austrian economics and libertarianism I soon realized I too was a libertarian. I wasn’t a socialist, I certainly wasn’t a neo-con (I hated Bush when he was part owner of the Texas Rangers – long before it was cool to hate him). I took that little quiz the LP has and that, in my opinion, sealed the deal (even though I think that test is flawed). For a long time I was a minarchist believing the state had some purpose. But now I’m a full blown anarcho-capitalist and much happier because of it.
I used to be a small government conservative. I think the thing that turned me around was my discovery of economics and philosophy. Economics taught me the destructiveness of state intervention and philosophy debates caused me to reevaluate my premises so that they don’t contradict themselves. Conservatism isn’t internally consistent and neither was progressivism which I turned to for a short while before dumping that too. Socialism and libertarianism seemed like the only consistent ideologies. Socialism seemed to have a track record of stagnation and human misery and free markets seemed to bring prosperity and freedom of the human spirit. It was an easy choice between the too. The funny thing is my conservative mother was the one who introduced me to Thomas Sowell books which eventually led me away from conservatism.
Economics and philosophy are also what led me to anarcho-capitalism. A better understanding of the latter also led me to fully embrace Austrianism - a sort of challenge to those neoclassicals who think it is ignorance that leads one to become an Austrian… I think the opposite holds.
I came from the “left”. My family roots were Haugian anti Clerical war resistors from Norway (picture the Amish except with buttons and cars). Later it merged with the pro-farmer , anti-war midwest progressives like Altgeld, Darrow and LaFollette. My parents were supporters of Goldwater until 1968 when they switched to McCarthy and then to McGovern. My parents kept the habit of farm life where you ate an early supper at 5pm and during that time we would watch the news with Walter Cronkite and my dad would give me a quick history lesson on whatever was featured on the news that evening during dinner, so by age ten I knew there was more to Moraji Desai than the fact that he started every morning drinking his own urine.
When I got older, age 16, I started listening to punk rock which I liked because it seemed to be advocating the promise of socialism without the commisar..So naturally I volunteered to work on Walter Mondale’s campaign in 1984 (it seemed logical at the time). Also Mondale was a favorite of that really impotent voting bloc of Norweigan American Lutherans. I met him in Wisconsin and he did the typical Norweigan thing of asking where my family was from …what all their names were…where my family in Norway was from and he determined that he played basketball against my mother’s cousin back when he was in High School. Say what you want about his politics and I will likely agree with you, but that still impresses me that he could figure all that out in less than five minutes from my grandmothers maiden name and what fjord she was born on (Lysenfjord in case we have any Norweigans out there).
But my defining moment came when I deviated from my anti-war traditions before Gulf War I. I supported getting rid of Saddam especially since he was a villain of the left back in the 1980s when Reagan was selling him weapons. I went to Europe and I visited the site of Hitlers Nurnberg rallies and wondered how he could convince people to fill up that huge stadium, march in silent unison with torches and then get their approve for him to start killing people. When I returned in January of 1991 the war had started and the Superbowl was on, and the halftime celebration was all praise of the war and the state with seemingly everyone chiming in and feeling good about it. That answered the question I had in Nurnberg and every year since then my opinion of the state and what it does has declined steadily. I’d guess right after the police beatings in Philadelphia in 2000 for the republican convention finally convinced me that no aspect of the state was needed even for “good” and the past eight years i have been studying that idea.
As I should have expected, everyone has a more interesting story!
I have another strange question. Now that you are all libertarian, does anyone still listen to talk radio? I love Michael Savage because of his speaking ability (his views are nuts), but I listen to Rush Limbaugh in order to find out what the average Republican is probably thinking.
Twirlcan, your writing is amazing! Where did you learn to write?
I, too, came from the right. I was always a little intellectually lost, but I identified with the right in the fact that I hated the left. However, I never applied much critical thinking to positions that I was alligning myself with. Then I went to graduate school. I received my MBA in economics and international business. Most of my economics professors were leftist keynesians. I was determined to argue with them but like most on the right had no real intellectual understanding of the free market that I claimed to champion. Then my reading started. First it was Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” then it was Rand. Finally I stumbled across this website and was introduced to Bastiat, Mises, Rothbard, etc. In the process, I have rejected virtually all of the neocon garbage from the material I was reading in order to fight the left. But occasionally, I still find myself fighting impulses to defend anybody the left is attacking.
I learned to write in …uh…public school. Now if only I could master spelling.
I never listened to talk radio at all. Years ago I worked in radio and determined that the masters in that field only had to speak clearly and constantly while wearing sweat pants. Picturing what is really behind the microphone made me never listen to it again.
I will occasionally tune into Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh. I find it entertaining, as they are completely nuts. It seems that they are unable to have a normal conversation with a liberal caller without raising their voice and yelling about how much safer we are today than with Saddam in power. Funny stuff, except the scary thing is, a lot of people belive it.
Twirlcan, do you read a lot? I too went to a government school and they barely taught writing! Papers would be graded on length unless the writing was shockingly poor.
I’ve never had the patience to sit down and read books. Most of my reading is done on forums!
I only listen to the radio while driving, which totals about 50 minutes a day. I like Savage, though at times I think he fits his name too well. Rusty Humphery usually knows what the problems are yet tries to promote a kind of neo-con solution. Jerry Doyle is like rusty, but instead of deliberately pushing the neocon agenda he tends to concede that no better options are feasable.
I was always “lazziez-faire” but never knew it. I always felt that people should be able to do whatever they want, granted they are not harming everyone else.
However, Ron Paul was the catalyst for me realizing I was libertarian. During the first network debates, he was the only one of the Republican candidates that stood out, and had logical and reasonable arguments to policy and/or lack thereof. I was hooked. I read more of his stuff on lewrockwell.com, and eventually came to Mises, and my mind was blown away with all the literature on the site.
Yes I do read quite a bit. Pretty much constantly.
In school it was more the qualities of teachers that I had rather than the institution itself. Teachers and Clergy were very admired where I grew up and I think that tended to attract very good people to those professions…whether it was state run or private.
