I would say I have to agree. It’s kismet that you added me as a friend when I signed up, as we seem to share a similar perspective.
It was Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy.
For me, and I suspect it is the same for all, it may be more telling to describe process as “discovering” rather than “becoming”. To the extent that anyone is compelled to identify their selves with a philosophy (which is what we are really doing) we use the experiences we have had thus far. I’m sure that the most important experiences probably happened in middle childhood, around 10 or eleven, when it began to occur to us that our world was increasingly demanding from us some indication of a moral sense. At this point many postures are formed. The most common, of course, is defyance… the “I never asked to be born” response. I wonder very deeply if this reaction, and the degree to which one can use it successfully, bears significantly on one’s later tendancy to sympathize with socialism or individualism. Looking back on my childhood, it is clear that I was very unsuccessful in deploying this defence. When I threatened to run away, my parents would offer to help me pack.
In time their loving mockery forced me to acknowledge the logical falacy of my complaint, and confront the implication. With reason my only ally it was only a matter of time until I discovered a political philoshphy which acknowledges this very inter-personal value determining dynamic as the fumdamental locus of the political unit.
Also… Who do I listen to in talk radio. I haven’t found any talk radio type format which is intellectually interesting. Most of it (Rush, etc.) is designed to appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect. I HIGHLY reccomend the podcasts put out by Russ Roberts called ECONTALK (econtalk.org).
I was an anarchist communist, but (prompted a bit by Milton Friedman, I think), realised that if workers were exploited because they weren’t getting the products of their labour, then they must be entitled to own their products. That took me back to Proudhon, and from him to the American individualist anarchists. My pro-market individualist anarchism was bolstered by reading Nozick at university, and then by David Friedman and Murray Rothbard.
Strangely enough the turning point was reading “An Empire of Wealth” by John Steele Gordon. Gordon himself endorses the American traditions of state banking and military adventuring, a pure Hamiltonian. But the book also included a taste of political revisionism and a populist perspective of capitalism that matched my classical liberal instincts. It left me with an intellectual appetite that went unfulfilled until I found the Mises Institute.
I think I may be the only one here that used to be a radical leftitst. I was a Marxist for a while then I started reading Bakunin, Proudhon, and other anarchist writers which turned me into a collectivist anarchist. This was in high school. Then I went to college and took macroeconomics and my professor was an Austrian economist. I was cured and the rest is history.
Since sophmore year of high school, I hated the whole education system with a passion. Conversely, it was the same time I was studying philosophy and never really saw the value of collective, one-size-fits-all education. I was also a moral nihilist/anarcho-socialist at the time looking for some meaning. Reading Rothbard’s For a New Liberty literally captivated me. Seeing his logic in support of natural law and subsequently natural rights and their further deductions; property rights and self-ownership, brought me out of realms of moral nihilism. The chapter on public schooling is what got me hooked on Rothbard, since I had never seen such well-thought out arguements and logic before.
How did you find Rothbard? By happenstance? From a teacher? The internet?
I can emphathize with the “collective, one-size-fits-all eduction” sentiment.
The arguments on this site.
I had heard about libertarianism, but I thought it was mostly idealistic and could never work in real life. One time I googled Free Market Economics (I was only interested in capitalism, but not libertarianism) and I discovered mises.org. I was facinated by the economic theory, but I disliked the anti-government ideology. Nevertheless, I continued logging on and reading up. I was amazed by how logical it was, its philosophy as well as its economics, and soon became convinced.