Thanks for the tip, Conza.
What’s the difference?
First I read critiques that made me doubt argumentation ethic. Soon I was sceptical about objective rationalist ethics in general. I also started having doubts about extreme apriorism in sciences, especially after recognizing flaws in some praxeological reasoning. Furthermore, individual liberty is not an absolute value that trumps everything for me.
I became an AnCap at age 12. I grew up in one of the craziest left wing towns in the USA; Berkeley, California. I called myself a liberal, even though I didn’t know what the term meant at the age of 8 or 9. Looking back, I was a hardcore minarchist even then. I didn’t really care much for politics. I simply enjoyed ridiculing conservatives for reasons I didn’t understand. But then something changed my life. I don’t remember exactly how, but I happened upon The Machinery Of Freedom. And I was hooked. I read up on Rothbard’s work and that of many others. I also recall seeing some of the videos produced by Ryan Faulk. They also really helped in my deconversion.
Azure, great travelogue. May your journey never end. Thx for sharing.
Hello everyone, cool thread, thought It would be nice to put my journey to anarchism here for my first post though it isn’t all that interesting.
The first anti-statist thought that ran through my head was about roads and eminent domain. I was ten, and an old road going to town was being replaced with a bigger one beside it. I asked my mother how the government got the land to put the new road on. She said that the road workers has someone come and survey how much the land is worth, then they take the land and give a more than fair deal for whatever it was worth. I asked, “What if they refuse to sell the land?” My mother just blew off the question basically and said they force them to sell, and it’s called eminent domain, so it’s okay. I argued against it for a while, but I just kept getting, “well that’s the way it is.”
Obviously, I couldn’t tell that the money used to pay for the land was stolen in the first place, but I think I did pretty good when I could tell the government had no right to force these people to sell their land.
From then on until about 19 I was very confused about where I stood on politics. I was always watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, sometimes Keith Olbermann, and even watched Glenn Beck. I never agreed with one hook line and sinker, though I considered myself a democrat- I’ve always been very anti-war so it wasn’t too hard to hate republicans during the Bush years. A friend then showed me a movie called Money Masters, a movie about the federal reserve and how the “money changers” throughout history have constantly gained control of countries by way of their money supply.
I believe this is when I got a little into zeitgeist, if any of you know what that is but those movies didn’t really satisfy anything I was looking for. Money Masters and zeitgeist seemed to suggest that Lincoln’s greenbacks were the correct way for a country to control their own money supply but this really just seemed like the same problem to me. Paper money will always have the incentive to be inflated away, the people will be begging for it because they can get their goodies without direct taxation, and politicians obviously love it because the get to keep playing Santa. Gold standard seemed to be the only solution. (Sadly still looking for statist solutions.)
Yes I voted for Obama, this was my way of saying screw you to all the war-mongering neocons out there (many where I live.) When absolutely nothing changed, it took me no time at all to see that essentially I just helped re-elect George Bush. At this point I have all democrats I know hating me for bashing Obama for being exactly like Bush, and all republicans already hated me because I didn’t support Bush or the war on terror. Also disagreed with the war on poverty, war on drugs, really just couldn’t find common-ground with anyone I knew.
About a year ago, lurking around the internet about the evils of the federal reserve, I came across Ron Paul. I couldn’t find one thing that I disagreed with and became very comfortable calling myself a libertarian. It felt nice to actually settle down on one ideology, it gets tiring having to explain how you’re not quite a republican but not quite a democrat either. I started cutting my own way on political arguments, instead of trying to find others that already agreed with me, I found I could actually argue my position, and convince others of the importance of small government.
I was reading the Campaign for Liberty articles every day, and came across a Tom Wood’s article I believe called “The Depression of 1920.” Near the middle, there is a great little explanation of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, and this explanation alone is what got me interested in economics. I started watching the Salerno intros to economics, and slowly started inching over to this website because the only interesting articles on Campaign for Liberty were actually cross-posted from this website.
I really stopped caring about the whole Ron Paul 2012 thang, not that he’s a bad guy or anything I just think if he got elected and actually started to cut government programs there would be a revolt against capitalism. The depression has to happen the way I see it, and if the clearing stage of the boom and bust cycle happens while a person like Ron Paul is in the oval office, all the blame will be put on the free market.
I’ve been reading these forums for around six months, and many of you guys have really helped me work through problems I’ve had with Austrian Economics. Also I’ve seen almost every video that the Mises Institute has posted on youtube. Read Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, then What Has Government Done to Our Money, and am now on page 37 of Human Action, which is much harder than I thought but am making slow progress. Thanks to everyone who makes this website and all this free information possible.
It’s hard to explain at what point I really became a market anarchist, but once you start thinking that all taxation is theft you’ve pretty much distanced yourself from being a statist as much as you can. I landed a good argument at work the other day comparing the extortion of the Mafia to government taxation. When you stop paying your “protection” money they do more than simply stop protecting you. I think listening to Hoppe’s argumentation ethics is what really did me in. I’m really not that good at explaining how anarchy would work in practice, but I’m pretty damn good at explaining why solutions through the state doesn’t work.
Sorry I turned that into a life story, but that’s how it went. And thanks to the OP, this was a nice way for me to think about where I’ve been in life ideologically.
By June 2008 I accepted the label “anarchist”, my blog entry here dates it and my subsequent blog entries since then have mostly been an exploration of my new anti-state position. As an aside, I prefer “anti-state” to “anarchist” because “anarchist” is nearly synonymous with “trouble-maker” “anti-authoritarian” “one who espouses chaos and social disorder” and so on. The Oxford English Dictionary could put a picture of the Joker character from the Batman comics next to its definition of “anarchist”. Like it or not, that is how the word is used. Its Greek roots are irrelevant.
I was raised a right-wing Christian conservative. 2000 was the first election in which I could vote. I voted for Bush in both '00 and '04. My parents were dissatisfied with the Republican party’s “impotence” during the late 90’s after the big brouhaha in 1994 about the Contract with America, and so on. Initially, I was pro-Bush. I was astonished by the September 11 attacks but never went in for the “Never Forget” super-patriotism. I was more interested in the strategic problems as I was becoming a soft neo-con. I bought into the Rumsfeld doctrine of “bringing the fight to them”. But by 2007/2008, it became clear that the actions in Afghanistan and Iraq had nothing to do with fighting terrorism. The simple reason is the from Macchiavelli’s The Prince, which every junior player in Washington DC keeps on his or her nightstand, let alone the movers and shakers like Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et. al. Machiavelli said, “… men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”
In other words, with your enemy, it’s all or nothing. If the Afghans or Iraqis or whoever really were our enemies, then the only sensible thing to do would be to destroy them. Of course, no population has ever been an “enemy”, the whole idea is a concoction of collectivist thinking. But the primary effect of the inherently taunting nature of US government occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is to raise an entire generation of new, permanent enemies on which the Military Industrial Complex can test its latest weapons.
Probably the #1 trigger of my transition to liberalism was the profligate spending of the Bush administration and US foreign policy. Domestically, they spent like Democrats. Overseas, they spent like Republicans. Under Bush, the Federal budget began an explosion that put Clinton, Carter or even LBJ to shame. Add to that Gitmo and the PATRIOT Act and I began to have serious dissent with US foreign policy, despite my having been temporarily duped by the neo-CONS. I was never comfortable with Gitmo. I figured that if it took Western civilization a few millenia to figure out habeus corpus and that indefinite detention is a bad idea, we’d probably better take a pause before creating “exceptions” to these basic legal rights, even in the wake of a “new Pearl Harbor.” After all, FDR’s Japanese concentration camps were a disgusting travesty of justice and Pearl Harbor was certainly a lot better justification than 9/11.
I am sad to say that, while I opposed waterboarding, I did employ my own, twisted rationalization for CIA black sites, extraordinary rendition, and so on (including torture). My reasoning was that waterboarding is obviously torture but it should not be openly employed “just like that” because it normalizes torture. Nevertheless, I thought it was a good idea for the US government to be a “benevolent imperialist” (what an oxymoron!) and that the ability to “process” supposedly “high-value targets” was an appropriate role for the imperialist. The only thing is that such activities necessarily had to remain secret because they had to remain illegal lest they be normalized. Just like the rest of the big neo-CON since 2001, the waterboarding debate is just another example of wagging the dog (I even realized it at the time) … how can there be any question that waterboarding is torture?? It’s not even a question and Faux News, Warmonger News Network and so on were treating it like it’s this BIG philosophical debate. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, we report, you decide” and so on.
Anyway, you can read the rest of the story up to June 2008 in my blog post above. Since then, it’s just been a matter of broadening and deepening my philosophical foundation in anti-statism. I read Rothbard and Hoppe and their explanations of the Weberian definition of the State as the territorial monopolist of law and security with the power to tax. I had a brief romance with the non-aggression principle but have ultimately decided that, while it’s a good tool for succinctly criticizing government policy, it’s too simplistic to be the “ultimate rule” of human society. It’s a good first approximation of what the law is likely to be in a natural order society. But a natural order society may or may not be “non-aggressive” in nature. There would likely be a wide variation of degrees of aggressiveness between different cultures, sans the State.
My current view is that the ultimate, root problem of the State is that it is the creation, maintenance and enforcement of a legal and moral double-standard. I tend to shy away from the Rothbardian theory that the State exists by virtue of “brainwashing” administered by the opinion-molding class. I also find the Hoppean rent-avoidance argument less than convincing. My own theory (not very well thought out, but the kernel is there) is that the legal/moral double-standard which enables the State to exist is itself a vestige of our own evolutionary history, namely, the acceptance by our ancestors of the explicit double-standard of alpha-male mating (yeah, I know it sounds weird, but I have a whole post written on the subject if you care to read more about it).
Clayton -
P.S. Even though my conversion to anti-statism happened around the time of the '08 election, it actually had nothing to do with Ron Paul. I wasn’t reading LRC or following the RP campaign at all. It wasn’t until early '09 that I even realized that RP was a minarchist/anarchist… I was (once again) duped by the MSM and their portrayal of RP as a crazy. But I read a couple articles and watched a few videos and realized what was going on. Needless to say, I don’t watch or read MSM anymore. Ever.
There was a lewrockwell.com link on antiwar.com so I bookmarked it.
That is the gist of it.
Cool story, Gregory Drew. I too had an instance with eminent domain where it was brought up in social studies class, I think in 8th grade. That totally struck the wrong cord with me. I didn’t become a libertarian until around my sophomore year of high school. First year of college I had to accept the idea that taxation is theft, but I did the usual minarchist rationalization of, “yeah it may be theft, but it’s necessary theft!”
Going through highschool, bush was in and bush wasn’t cool so I was an anti-republican. During the Kerry-Bush election in 2004, I didn’t even stay up to watch the results. I told my family it ‘wasn’t worth it’.
Eventually I took a macroecnomics class my jr year, and learned about milton friedman. I read “free to choose”, and that gave me a few good arguments about a few sectors of the economy like education and social security. I was in LD Debate, and I hate to say it, I owned everyone with my ultra “competition is bad you gotta centrally plan things” case. I’ve never met someone who was really strong politically or economically.
I honestly have no idea how I found mises.org. Or when or why I watched zietgeist, or anything. I just soak up stuff. The anarcho libertarian - don’t attack innocent people - way of organizing society is the theory of economics and political philosophy that makes the most sense to me.
I have some ideas in my head I’m not rushing to develop, but they’ll come out eventually and I’ll be sure to let you all know about them. I believe they can move anarchism forward, particularly with the leftists who often counter with “what if someone owns all the water” examples.
I saw Zeitgeist as well. Way too conspiratorial for my taste, but some of their information on the Federal Reserve I believe is historically accurate. They didn’t list any sources at all, as far as I can tell, which makes me very skeptical
I’ve covered my story before on here and on my blog but I’ll try to cover it in a bit more depth here and maybe add some details I haven’t mentioned before.
It’s less exciting than it might sound.
Pretty much Apolitical till about 2002/2003 when I was aged 12/13.
It was at this age that my natural rebelliousness combined with teenage anti-authoritarianism led me to become an Individualist.
I grew up in a family that leaned ‘left liberal’ but not blatantly so and my mum was always talking of rights- for the poor,the mentally ill and the like- so I unconsciously took on that position.Exploring my position I considered there to be both positive and negative rights.Reading an encyclopedia with a small chapter on politics I discovered liberalism(but since the book made no distinction between classical and ‘social liberalism’ I thought they were the same and saw no contradiction).I even went so far as to think that water should be freely provided by governments .Possibly I held something like the homestead principle since I held those living in shanty towns should be able to own the land they live on if it is unowned.However all of this was theoretical and I did not try to apply it to real life politics.I pledged then to always be in favour of freedom and always opposed to Nazi’s/Fascism.
At the beginning of the Iraq war ,I was I’m sorry to say pro-war.
Never really held a consistent or clear ideology for a while.In 2004 was more interested in ethical issues due to a religious class at high school and thought about war,abortion,euthanasia and capital punishment.I did a study on war yet was still pro war.My positions on abortion and euthanasia were then what they are now: pro voluntary choice. I drifted between pro and anti-war over the years of the Iraq war listening to both sides of the debate too mindlessly.On capital punishment I was in favour of it and other kinds of retributive punishment- a position I have now returned to after years of being against it.
At some point during 2004 ,my dad called me “left wing” for my individualism(ironic I know) and I was inspired by a Socialist teacher I had.
In 2005 aged 15 I discovered Objectivism(I didn’t know it at the time,it was just on Individualism) on the internet via my interest in Individualism.I also supported half heartedly a little known party( in the UK and especially for the US audience here -I’m from Scotland) the Scottish National Party( a mildly leftist crowd).Through this website I discovered the name Ayn Rand and from sometime in 2006/2007 I was a Randroid.I imbibed the philosophy without critical thought.I took in the politics parts but didn’t much consider them important or exciting.I did learn a lot though.It was bad though.I was an ARI type not an Atlas Society goon.During this time I read Rand’s discussion of Anarchism and believed she crushed it.I felt then I had all the answers.
I came across Libertarianism through Rand and Objectivism but was initially critical.Later I wondered why they both couldn’t get along even if Libertarians were wrong on things.December 2007, I first discovered Ron Paul and his wikipedia page.At the time I just thought he was crusty conservative.
For some unknown reason in 2008 (aged 18), I watched videos of Ron Paul and I think he pretty much instantly made me libertarian(especially Anti-war).From there I discovered MiltonFriedman,Rose Wilder Lane,Henry Hazlitt and many others.I also read Mises.org and Lewrockwell.com.Even from the start I was quite radical.I realized I needed to learn economics in 2008 as the recession hit but it wouldn’t be till later in the year continuing on till now that I would even understand the basics.That year I found and joined the UK Libertarian Party (LPUK).I hoped to start a Scottish branch and planned it with another person.About october 2008 I started looking into Anarcho-Capitalism with a weird kind of curiosity.
At age 19 ,in February 2009 I was questioning my Minarchism and wondering whether the state was moral.I answered no yet I kept by Minarchism by thinking Anarchism was too far and Minarchism was enough.I was scared and resisted the truth.I couldn’t give up this believe that it seemed so many held.It just seem frightening and dangerous.Soon enough though,I accepted it and sought to understand it as well as basic austrian theory like praxeology.Reading on Anarchism and discovering Voluntaryism, I decided political action was in vain and let my LPUK membership run out.
By late 2009 ,Hoppe and others had shown me how completely ruined the case for Minarchism was.Others like Stephan Kinsella made me consider new stances on issues I hadn’t even though of before.This year I see there is no limit to how radical you should be if it’s correct.This for me has meant a thorough anti-war stance which includes opposing most wars throughout history and opposing soldiers themselves too.
“Andrew Ryan, for whatever it’s worth, I’m a big fan of Nietzsche too, and Camus along with all my other libertarian philosophers. I understand ethics to be entirely subjective and I think the concept of morality is too vague and muddy to correspond to anything in reality.”
Exactly, congratulations on having a realistic understanding of the subject. even on this site there are those who are still utterly into ethics, this being said I like to appeal to “post ethical” preferences, AKA appealing to freedom and so forth. I combine the ethical arguments with economic arguments in maintaining that under a voluntaryist system of social organization the greatest number of people will be able to achieve their value preferences without violently imposing their preferences upon others. So basically more freedom, more prosperity, less violence. All widely held value preferences against which there’s not much argumentation.
“What’s the difference?”
Not much per se in the social structure advocated, its kind of like the difference between libertarianism and objectivism. But the point is that I am much less in favor of totally capitalistic ventures such as the traditional firm structure and motivation of money as profit per se, and far more in favor of a more mutualistic approach involving a more “voluntary socialism” including communal efforts, charities, and different sorts of firms. I consider “capitalism” as a more traditional “business for monetary gain” and traditional hierarchical firm structure, whereas “free markets” are more mutualistic and varied in nature. Thusly volunaryism, in my view, is much more focused upon voluntary interactions no matter what they are, rather than simply capitalism.
I too was Ron Paul related. What drew me to Paul was that he knew and supported policies. He actually knew stuff. 99% of other politicians are just talking heads. Which drew to take such a risk with such a rash change in policy.
It wasn’t until November this past year where I driven toward small gov/libertarianism. Made the most difficult choice of my life voting for a libertarian candidate over Christie. While researching Ron Paul and candidates for that Governor election, came across campaign for liberty. There, I met someone called Hash who introduced me to Rothbard. I read both For a new liberty and ethics of liberty. And that is basically where I am now. After reading Rothbard, I consider myself an-cap.
Currently struggling towards a strategy towards liberty.
I was your average neo-con through high school and college, but had become disgusted with the Bush regime. After graduating college in 2007, I became aware of Ron Paul. Like many others, my transformation really started with him. At first, I thought that Ron Paul was way too crazy and radical. However, the more I listened to him, the more his ideas made sense. When it came time for the Republican caucus, I showed up and voted for Ron Paul, not so much because I fully agreed with him (I still felt at the time that he was too radical in his views on the drug war and closing so many different government agencies), but because he seemed like the only candidate with a brain.
Of course, Ron Paul lost, but during this time I continued to follow him right on through to his Rally for the Republic. It was around that time that I bought his book “The Revolution: A Manifesto”. In reading that, I was introduced to lewrockwell.com and mises.org. Through the vast literature on those two sites, I gradually became a solid minarchist libertarian. In all the reading I did, I seen many references to anarchy, but felt it to be too impractical so I didn’t give it much of a thought, despite the uneasiness that I felt in that minarchy was still a little inconsistent with libertarian principles.
Then, last summer I was listening to the Lew Rockwell podcast, and I heard his discussion with Walter Block on anarchy. (http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-show/2009/07/29/126-walter-block-is-an-anarchist/) The great arguments and points made in this podcast really got me interested in reading more about it. So, I did my research (and continue to do my research), but it probably took me less than a month after hearing that podcast to make the leap. I’ve been an anarchist for close to a year, and I haven’t looked back.
Mutalsim? Come on now I think you can do better than that. I haven’t read too much on mutalism, but it’s economic theory sounds very flawed. I do agree with some of their critiques on big big business and government, however.
“I grew up around poor people. Most of them (at least the ones I grew up around) don’t deserve the help they get. Everyone that I’ve ever known that has worked hard and kept true to themselves has done well for themselves.”
This false assumption (that poor = lazy) is the primary reason libertarians have problems gaining any ground amongst common people. To so cavalierly dismiss millions of people as “getting what they deserve” does nothing for their psyche but impact it negatively, and most would loudly oppose to you spitting on their life’s achievements. Many people work hard at the only thing they know how, mediocrity. And mediocrity never paid anyone’s bills.
Believe it or not people with 3 jobs or 50+ hr work schedules can still live in poverty. Libertarians are going to have stop villifying the poor or they will be seen as nothing more than a handout to rich people (trust me, I know this personally).
I’ve not been converted to absolute anti-statism. I’m more of an anti-power consolodationist. Nevertheless, my journey started as a young kid. I always was questioning of so-called authority figures. I was a huge anarchist as a youngin. Grew up to realize their had to be some kind of rules. So I became more of a minarchist.
I actually kind of agree with The Late Andrew Ryan. I would probably immerse myself in a more capitalistic society, but if there are co-ops and communal organizations, I don’t think that poses a threat to freedom at all. If communists do not value profiteering and want to get their own little community (let’s give them the Yukon Territory ), they should certainly be free to do so.
That’s why in my avatar I attempt to be more voluntaryist, but I don’t think any strict an-caps would force capitalism on people who don’t want it. Even voluntary democracies I would not take issue with (guess it depends on the size, but that’s a different topic) because they wish to subject themselves to a monopolistic state. But obviously I think laissez-faire would be the quickest way to prosperity and most people would mimick that. But because you don’t take issue with profit doesn’t mean you can’t support charity, and I think a lot of libertarians (ahem, Objectivists) sometime get overzealous in their defense of greed.
The short version of the story: The collapse of the banking system in the U.S. in Sept. 2008 (make no mistake, the system did collapse, and it remains collapsed). The events were entirely consistent with the Austrian school of economic thought, and the way politicians and voters behaved is consistent with Libertarian concepts of what government is and how it works.
After Sept. '08, I was convinced that interventionist economics (referred to as “mainstream”) does not explain reality.
Omnipotent Government is an abomination, and Minimal Government is impossible. That leaves no alternative but anarcho-Capitalism.
“Mutualsim? Come on now I think you can do better than that. I haven’t read too much on mutalism, but it’s economic theory sounds very flawed. I do agree with some of their critiques on big big business and government, however.”
I didn’t say that I was a mutualist, mutualists have some good ideas (including some possibly incredibly about what constitutes property rights) but for the most part their overall framework is just wrong. However, I sympathize with the general mutualistic position and the term makes sense for what I mean, therefore I refer to such things as charities, non profit organizations, co-ops, and communally run firms and defense organizations mutualistic efforts, the term makes sense. If you object to any of these things I expect good reasons why. Furthermore I consider that these aspects are the ONLY way that we will EVER reach voluntaryism. People will never surrender their democracy if they believe that they are at the total whim of the market, this is why mutualistic organizations must be presented as alternatives to create what I consider “post political politics”. In this way voluntary safety nets can be formed, and all aspects of the state which couldn’t be easily replicated by traditional firms could be solved communally. All this would be voluntary and therefore bound by the price system, competition, and consumer demand. If any of this appears flawed to you I would like to know in what way it is.
To support only traditional firm structure and traditional capitalistic enterprises is to seemingly support an utterly complete monopoly in the most important market of all, that of ideas.
@Eric80
Exactly, even though I would ask you to reconsider your (apparent) viewpoint that the communal societies would somehow be excluded from or at odds with the rest of society, I see the great majority of mutualistic organizations working along side and with the rest of the society, in some cases I see mutualistic efforts being utterly incorporated or even taken over by capitalist organizations(which would mean they were no longer mutualistic) and possibly even vice-versa.
I don’t maintain that ancaps oppose this, I merely maintain that their title and attitude is less focused at these sort of actions and more focused upon traditional capitalistic enterprises. Never forget that the negative aspect of all state actions is not the actions themselves per se, it is the fact that aspects of them are involuntary and not subject to market laws (many, not all)