I basically only voted when it was time to vote, then tuned out. I have other interests as a Christian than the world system. I had an illusion, I learned, that whileas politicians were to limited degree crooked that the system in America restrained excessive corruption.
Then, in 2008, I saw GWB hold a press conference with Hank Paulsen. He stated that there was danger to the economic system. The solution presented was to give Paulsen unlimited sole discretionary control, with no checks and balances upon him from other branches or representatives of government, over $700 billion to give to banks. Paulsen was additionally to be granted immunity from criminal prosecution.
The illusion was shattered on the spot. GWB was clearly lying in my sight. Moreover, the dynamics of the unchecked and unaccountable authority to be granted to Paulsen was immediate evidence of corruption extended to and permeating the very highest levels of both business and government in clear collusion. It was then I realized that the glory and the wonder of so great a nation of America I envisioned and held dear to my heart ~~ was nowhere on the map.
Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned. To rob from the people of the United States of America the glory of this nation’s heritage, the Constitution, and the system of Government provided by the blood of the founding fathers is a crime worthy of extreme and guided passion in response in restoration of same.
That is when I began to study to see how deep, far, and wide the readily apparent corruption extended and to seek the proper path for counter-revolution to the revolution that had clearly been waged and foisted on the American people out of sight through the backdoor.
What I would say to those who perpetrated this violation of all that I hold dear and holy, and I consider the founding of this nation to be not merely historical but rather holy, is that they have messed with the wrong woman. Because I can guarantee the powers that be that I will knock them from their high perches, send them crashing to the ground, and slam a boot upon their necks.
That’s how I really feel if any should ask “How do you really feel?” What they should fear is the level power I have at my disposal like Joan of Arc on steroids.
My conversion to “Anti-Statism” was accomplished in my conversion and only recently found application in 2008 upon realization of how far this nation has fallen from her original charter.
What immediately comes to mind are the incentive problems caused by communal ownership. We’ve seen this happen all too often with natural resources in State hands.
However the problems of a syndicalistic structure is a problem of entrepreneurship and management, and is outside the field of catallitics. If you can make it work better than the traditional heirarchial firm structure, then great! Just don’t come to me and take my assets to be “given back to the community” ;p
It seems to me that anarcho-capitalism really just promotes freedom. Just that when you have an emergent order, it will decide upon capitalism as the most efficient economic order.
My own journey began when reading books such as 1984, and also due to my anti-authoritarian streak. I also questions why some groups should have power over other groups, and why was it OK for some groups to take from other groups simply because they voted that way?
My journey continued with Ron Paul, and then Atlas Shrugged, and this website, and it continues to this day
I’ve always wondered what goals an AI would come up with save for those seeded by humans.
Me too.
In the way I understand both terms, there is no difference, but I believe that the most common conception of anarcho-capitalism (as formulated by Rothbard) entails a single objective morality and law, whereas voluntarism leaves room for different systems of morality and law. The question, of course, is what happens at the boundaries. Maybe it wouldn’t look so different than today, and I believe that the “thousand nations” approach is a good way to get many of the benefits of anarcho-capitalism and may be an interim step on the way there.
I still have some issues with what is truly “voluntary” (i.e. man dying of thirst in the desert offered a drink in exchange for perpetual slavery). There are some situations where force might be justified (i.e. an oxygen company turns off the air to a colony, thus suffocating its residents) but libertarian theory would not necessarily agree (the people have no right to coerce the company and demand it redistribute its property!). I still have many questions that I am in the process of working through and resolving!
Holy shit. C.S. Lewis could have written you right into the N.I.C.E. in That Hideous Strength. Very glad to know you got out of That Hideous Worldview.
I was raised a paleoconservative, but there were issues which I was led to believe were important enough to justify violating principle over. Drug use, for instance, and of course the usual police, roads, courts, and military. Unfortunately, this position soon fell way to neoconservatism after 9/11.
After that unfortunate regression, I had my first push toward libertarianism when in 12th grade I was assigned the position of marijuana legalization for a debate. I went in a drug warrior, and after earnestly researching my position, came out on the other side completely opposed to the drug war. I guess at that time I could be said to be a neoconservative with secret, socially liberal views. I stayed that way for about 4 years. Listening to conservative talk radio helped cement my neocon side, but I was constantly troubled by the inconsistencies in my worldview. Nevertheless, I probably would have stayed that way for much longer except for one thing. Walter Williams filled in for Rush Limbaugh one day that I listened to the program, and I was exposed to economics.
I began to look into the actual theory of the free market (as opposed to the conservative rhetoric in favor of the very ill-defined and unprincipled “capitalism”), and stumbled accross Frederic Bastiat. With that, I quickly surged through neoconservatism and back into paleoconservative territory. I lived there for about a year. Then, in 2006, I was introduced to Ron Paul. The biggest contribution of Paul on my journey to libertarianism was leading me to discover that I could not simultaneously support a free economy and the warfare state, any more than I could support the welfare state. With that revelation, I became a minarchist libertarian.
Around that time a friend introduced me to the LvMI. I began to be exposed to the market anarchist postition more and more, and although I couldn’t quite accept it, it did appeal to me. I was sort of on the “great idea; too bad it can’t work” bandwagon for six months. Then on May 11th, 2006, in a facebook conversation in the Libertarian Christians group, someone asked me the question which would change my worldview forever:
“If the state is so bad at everything it does, why should we entrust it with defense and dispute resolution”?
I found I had no answer, and by midnight (May 12, 2006) I was an anarchist, although it would take another few months for me to call myself one. That summer I read Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty, and that smashed all vestiges of statism in my worldview. I progressed through pure Rothbardianism to Agorism over the next few months. It has now been over four years since my de-programming from statism, and they have been without contest the best four years of my life. All the frustration and disillusionment with politics, the cognative dissonance, the need to rationalize immoral acts with the notion of a “lesser evil”, are completely gone. It was like I had broken intellectual and spiritual bones all through my life, and they were suddenly and for the first time set right.
I know my conversion started just this past August, when I entered my first “official” economics class. As I was trying to do well on the AP Economics exams, both Macro and Micro economics, I began looking at other books to learn more about the subject. This was also the same time I was trying to learn the “reasons” for the economic collapse, which lead me into various book about everything from the Fed to the Lehman Brothers, including Ron Paul’s “End the Fed.” This I then followed between it and other book’s suggested reading list to Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson,” and even an attempt to read “Human Action,” which I still haven’t finished, and eventually to this site.
What I found ironic was my economics teacher had seen me reading these books and was telling me to stop, as he believed I would not pass the AP exam, as it is exclusively Keynesian and Monetarist economics for the Macro exam (he was right, its the only AP exam I didn’t earn a 5 on, only a 4), and he wouldn’t get his $50 from the county for every student who earns a 3 or above.
Before I began reading these economics books, which lead me to anarcho-capitalism, I actually had a dismal view of most of it, especially as the only local supporters of Ron Paul at my school were the druggies, but I did view the need for more of a “watch-keeper” state, so my transition wasn’t as far as some.
As wrong as I was, it was merely the logical consequence of my misconceptions as to the nature of human rationality and its place in the forming of society. Misconceptions which were and still are the almost universally prevailing understanding of the matter. That Hideous Worldview is far more common than you may wish to believe.
@mwalsh- I see this is your first post, welcome, sir.
When your teacher told you to stop reading books such as “End the Fed” and “Economics in One Lesson”, was it truly because he thought these books would not help you get a high grade on the AP test, or was it because he disagreed with the content of the books? What is his attitude toward sound economics?
Thank you for welcoming me, I have been reading without signing up for a while.
He flat out said that they would not help me get a good grade, and that I should avoid such material if I wanted a good grade on the test. As he was teaching “to the test”, literally, he wouldn’t go much beyond it, although I did manage to get him to cover a little bit about Austrian economics. This amounted to him saying there is another economcis called Austrian, and it is laissez-faire, thats was about it. It was also 2nd semster of Senior year, and the last class of the day, so most of the students had stopped caring back in January about this class, as we only needed 1 semester of economics to graduate, which for us was Microeconomics. He never really said what his own views were, but I know he had started looking at more than just his test material when he saw me reading those books, although he was calling it “junk”, so although he may have started educating himself, I still believe he is not Austrian
I used to think this way a long, long time ago, until the importance of personal tastes and values was apparent to me. I’m surrounded by engineers and scientists who also think in an “engineer’s syndrome” kind of way. This viewpoint should help.
Hopefully I don’t regress then and fall prey to the “engineer’s syndrome” as I’m majoring in mechanical engineering when school starts again… and seeing as I have Dilbert’s “The Knack” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlJsPa6UwcM)
I have lived in Ithaca, New York for most of my life, and as such, I’ve been subjected (maybe not the best word, as it wasn’t necessarily bad on all counts) to an incredibly progressive atmosphere. I grew up not knowing much about politics, other than “George Bush bad, republicans evil, civil freedoms yay” and even those understandings weren’t outright understandings. But, that’s fair; I was a little kid, and little kids are the prime victims of groupthink. As I got older, I started becoming more aware of electoral politics, current issues like the wars, etc., and the basis for a lot of my political thought came directly from my father, who is the “good kind” of small-government conservative that has no patience for progressive republicans and senseless politics. I more or less adopted his thoughts, as I still believe to this day that he is one of the most intelligent and informed people that I’ve ever met, and I live in an ivy-league town brimming with professors.
And then (yes, of course, how couldn’t you see it coming) I started reading about Ron Paul. At this point, I actually discovered the reasoning behind the idea of small government, how statist policy had distorted the country that we live in, and how it had distorted the economy into what it shouldn’t be. When I first began discovering about “corporatism” I finally found what had made me so uncomfortable about Republicanism, and the modern strain of conservatism. I started learning that the most grievous perversion of the economy, and thus society, was the buddy-buddyism between business and the government, and that those who were saying that we live in a “free market” were completely wrong. This made me really, really, really hate the state a lot, and I had stumbled across some videos and articles about anarcho-capitalism and voluntarism. These ideas seemed to make it all click together: that the state was an artificial monster, and a house-of-cards that could tumble at any moment. That’s where I am now. Who knows where I’ll be in a few years. I’ve got a lot of room to grow, and I’m acquainted with a lot of left-anarchists. I’ve been toying with the idea of “panarchism” tying in with voluntary association.
My road has been from democratic liberal (in European sense) in high school over minarchist libertarian in college to anarcho-capitalist (but questions regarding natural law / ethics / how to and why to “coerce” people in not coercing you).
Back at home, I was fortunate enough not to have leftist parents, but the pro business mind set was quite unsophisticated. At 16, I really thought we had free markets - especially for international trade - and favored institutions such as WTO and IMF to “force governments to be more pro free market”. I was also pro EU under the lie that a free market bureacracy was needed “to preserve peace”. I did not understand monetary policy at all. My views were “business = good, socialism = bad”, without thinking much about corporatism.
Being pro business was also my way of rebelling against my peers and school teachers, who were overwelminghy socialist. I live in Belgium and we all go to public schools, and because we have feet voting (basically indirect voucher system) instead of schools per district our schools outperform US schools. This was generally seen as why state education worked, because “USA = capitalism, Belgium = mixed economy”.
Not understanding feet voting at the time,and committed to defend capitalism/business, I went to the library and searched for a book on economics. I took home Free To Choose from Milton Friedman, because the title and book description indicated free market tendencies. Reading it, I stumbled upon the argument how minimum wage laws keep the unskilled unemployed and how farm subsidies keep the third world country farmers from making an honest living. I loved these arguments as they were based on logic and at the same time helped me explain “why there are poor countries if globalisation is so great” and even why unions were not so great! (I always hated them for always picking on entrepreneurs, but had no real arguments against them except for that they always complained.)
My moment of glory came when in my senior year in high school, I had to debate a socialist on whether we needed farm subsidies. I let him make the case on how farmers make so little money blabla, than I told him African farmers deserved to make our food if they could do it cheaper. I asked him why he preferred white EU farmers over poor African farmers… he literally sat there shocked by the argument and chained by the logic. In the end, all he uttered was “I don’t believe you care about African farmers”. Both the (socialist) teacher and the (democratic) class vote had to admit I won the debate.
Convinced that there were more stupidities socialists believed in, I went to study Business. (Also considered Economics, but A. wanted to be rich B. had heard about Keynes focus and C. all graduates seemed to work for government.) I became a libertarian minarchist (without thinking much about the inconsistencies) just by learning all the bullshit in my Econ courses (both the ISLM model and the Antitrust stuff I found very surreal).
My worldview was about to become more consistent in my last years of college when I discovered Ron Paul via Youtube. Monetary policy, foreign policy, US as a constitutional republic, … RP gave me my first REAL political education. I discovered LVMI and read discussions on this forum between minarchists and that special breed called ancaps. I became an ancap, first by elimination, than got more and more convicted as I kept reading. I graduated college with a naive Randian notion of wanting to make it big in business and “outgrow the state”.
I started working for an elite US strategy consulting firm and was excited to finally be rid of the socialists and keynesians. Boy was I in for a disappointment. Not onyl did I pay 50% income tax from day 1, I was also about to be staffed on a case for the Belgian government helping them bail out, nationalize and sell one of our biggest banks! On top of that, we had an internal presentation from a global top management partner that defended the 2008 bailouts globally and the FED policy specifically. Basically, the firm I worked for argued for socialism in Davos etcetera. Talked to employees of competitors, they had no clue either.
At this point, I got irritated by everything:
Traffic jams every day, thank you gov’t (and stupid Belgian people) for publicly providing roads!
A socialist colleague getting staffed on a project I wanted but could not get because the Belgian gov’t delayed the bailout implementation but not long enough to do a case in between. (Why did they hire a socialist in the first place?!)
A global internal memo saying no more office transfers for my rank (bye bye low taxes, stuck in fucking Brussels) and no pay raises out of “solidarity” with a certain office that made big losses.
Divorce by my parents that took ages (still going, now 7 years already). Yuy for public courts!
Even more delays in the bailout case, so now my career could not get started even if it was working for the enemy!
Needless to say, I quit after 9 months. I didn’t bother to explain.
Here I am, 1 year later. Savings eroded by 50%, as I refused to take benefits. Had to decompress totally. Big business, which I always saw as the last beaken of rational thought and capitalistic spirit, turned out to be a bunch of highly intelligent but hardly critical monkeys. I turned to philosophy, searching for a new destiny.
Applied for Phd in Natural Law (specifically praxeological NAP wrt proliferation of ABC weapons), got told impossible without positivist element. Fuck it, not going to defend the state. Turned to complexity theory, there’s some nice things going on there concerning semantic web and reputation (basically law system if you think about it). Should have applied few months ago already, but I’m getting really lazy in my attitude and pessimistic in my outlook.
Bit of depression kicking in maybe, but also just angry at people: These dumb fucks make me suffer as I got faced with the moral dilemma of quitting a lucrative career or betraying all that I believe in. It’s a prisonner dilemma, I get to pay all the costs but get none of the (increasingly immoral) benefits.
Anyway, I hope I find a job in the complexity research department, if not I’ll apply for some 9 to 5 economic advisor job and do the research on my own in my free time. Not that I care much about degrees as such anyway.
@Consultant: If you’re considering more education anyway, why not go into tax law? If I had it to do over again and I was choosing a career that is a) in demand and b) opposed to the State, I would go into tax law. At least you can help people fight the State. Yes, the game is fixed against you but so what? Every dime you save your clients is a dime the government doesn’t get in tax revenue, fines and fees. And, best of all, your income is being earned out of these savings!
It’s hard to believe, but capitalism has not yet been completely destroyed in the U.S. Perhaps similar opportunities exist in Belgium?
For example, I was at a business today, they are marvelously profitable. What do they do? They serve their customer’s needs! And, they serve customers’ needs better than most competitors. They are smart. It’s boom time for them. They are expanding, constantly looking for opportunities.
They are entrepreneurs, nothing stands in their way. When most businesses look to stretch payment to their vendors, this company pays their vendors quickly. Why? Their vendors love them and work hard to perform at a high level because they know they will get paid quickly, as in one or two days! Their customers love them because the company does what it says it will do reliably.
You sound like you are on the ball and have much to offer. Try to hook up with entrepreneur types. As long as the entrepreneur class is not thrown into the Gulag, there is hope.
I worked for one of the top 3 (McKinsey, BCG, Bain). I know people at all of them, nobody has a clue. Also, at least back in 08/09, McK and BCG had around 40% of their revenue coming from financial services, while Bain did bet big on PE in the last decade, so all 3 of them have more of an incentive to keep the FED corporatism going than they like to admit.
I am so negative because I keep on getting desillusioned. The world is just more corrupt (or at least less principled) than I believed.
Not really looking at tax law, but thanks for the suggestion. I consider applying at a Belgian entrepreneur I know in China, in fact one of my college mates (from China originally) is starting there soon after being introduced by me and wants me to join him so we can end up becoming entrepreneurs together. Also considered applying at Jim Roger’s fund, as that would be more in line with my philosophical interests and I guess he’d understand my story better. There’s also this big American industrial company with libertarian owners, will look into that. Whatever I do, I refuse to work for a socialist boss ever again.
Ideally though, because my hate for the state is now bigger than my love for financial success, I’d like to work in a law/internet related academic field. I truly believe that with the semantic web online reputation will become so important that social ostracism will kick in and gov’t laws will become irrelevant. (E.g. if you divorce, you find an online ‘judge’, make an agreement, the agreement negates all effects of staying married officially, if you don’t stick to agreement your online reputation gets a big hit.) The big mistake the founding fathers made is assuming people would be awake enough to overthrow gov’t from time to time. This was a big mistake, and complexity research has the potential to correct that mistake. If it does end up doing that, I want to be part of that. As I said before, finding a 9 to 5 economic advisory job is the backup plan if I want to pursue this.
All in all, I will devote my life to liberty in one way or another. If anything, I’ll come out of this period with a better understanding of AE and philosophy of law
PS Sorry for grammatical errors in previous post, I wrote it in a rush.
Edit: Jesus Christ, what happened to my paragraph spacing? It shows it as perfectly spaced out when I edit, but not on the forum itself. What’s going on?
Edit again: Had to be inventive and use quote boxes to space out my paragraphs for some reason. No idea why it’s doing this to me and not to you guys.
I used to be such a good little statist…
I spent my early school years up to sixth grade in a Christian private school. This left me two main legacies with me–one good, the other bad. The good legacy was that, unlike an incompetent public school, it lit a fire in my heart for learning because it actually made it kinda fun. The bad legacy was a tendency to value far too highly obedience to authority. My school could have very well been a Catholic school considering the amount of arbitrary discipline was instilled in us. We all walked in a perfectly straight line when going to lunch or something like that, even at lunch we’d all go completely quiet if the principal (an almost mythical figure of authority in our eyes) walked in. Obedience and discipline were inculcated as much as possible–if you didn’t follow the rules to the letter you would be punished, up to and including the paddle (a mythical punishment that left us all in fear and reverence like the hands of an angry God). This left me with an all too unquestioning tendency to be obedient to ALL authority–parents, school teachers, political leaders–and to accept their word as law.
Growing up, too, my mother would play Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on the radio as she drove me to and from school. She was and, to a lesser extent, still is a big neoconservative. I ended up fully accepting those views–largely because of the obedience to authority from school–as immutable and absolute law. Anyone who disagreed was stupid. However, like with my private school, she also left me a good legacy: she made me CARE about what was happening in the political world, even if my views were filtered through the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh. She also introduced me to a then-very unknown little radio personality: Glenn Beck.
Fast forward to my middle- and high-school years, to the beginning of the George Bush presidencies. I was still a firm believer in the law (I faithfully obeyed speed limits to the absolute when I started driving, often annoying anyone caught behind me) as absolute and immutable. Why? Because it’s the law. Why should we care about the law? BECAUSE IT’S THE LAW. Anyway, I started out as a Yay-Bush neocon, supporting him and defending him/his unjust wars. Yet as my high school years were ending and college beginning, I was more and more seeing the failure Bush was. First it was “Man, Bush’s first term was good but he’s done NOTHING lately!” to “Bush sure made a lot of mistakes…” to “Bush is a horrible president!” eventually. My neocon faith smashed, I drifted for a while, wondering what TO believe.
Two things happened at roughly the same time. First, I got back into Glenn Beck and followed him as he, too, began questioning what was going on in Washington D.C. I very much traced his evolution from neocon to sort of libertarian and, like him, eventually turned on both democrats and republicans. Also like him, however, I kept my die-hard patriotism and belief that the Founding Fathers (capitalized, of course, for they were closer to gods than men in my eyes) were heroes whose Constitution was the greatest piece of political work in history. If we could JUST return to that–nevermind the nagging doubt in the back of my head that minarchism was impossible, that the government would always continue to grow–things would be better.
Second, I read a book. One would expect it to be some political treatise or great work of economics that started my journey here, but it wasn’t. It was a simple fiction book called “The Last Prophet” or something like that. It didn’t touch on economics or politics in any real way, but it DID touch on neurology. In the footnotes it talked about the implications of one of the concepts in the book and mentioned a nonfiction book, “The Brain that Changes Itself.” This was the first real nonfiction book I ever read (up until that time, while an avid reader for all of my life, I had always read fiction). This led to me reading other nonfiction books, mostly political in nature (the first two were “The Dark Side of Liberalism” and “Crazies to the Left of me, Wimps to the Right”).
As I groped around in the darkness for the truth (reading such divergent books as Machiavelli’s “The Prince”–back then I had a pragmatic streak a mile wide, and to a lesser extent still retain it–and “The 5000 Year Leap”, recommended by Glenn Beck) Glenn Beck really started to dig into the Federal Reserve onto his show. Around this time, too, he began to bring Ron Paul onto his shows more. Whereas I had seen Ron Paul as a kook in the 2008 elections since I was still a neocon who believed in the wars, now he was beginning to seem more reasonable (mostly by virtue of being next to Beck, a man I revered and still today respect, though I no longer share his views). I really began following his work and read his manifesto, which led me here.
One thing I forgot to mention was that in my first year of college, I resolved to try and become President of the United States. I was still a die-hard patriot and believed firmly in the republic and its inherent virtue. I simply believed that SOMEONE had to sacrifice their happiness to bring the republic on track and, though I had no desire to do it, I resolved that I would be the one to do it. Somewhat naive, looking back, but my motives were pure. It was only a few months ago with my conversion that I began doubting this dream. I’m still not sure if I’ll follow through with it and try to become the next Ron Paul or not. Still, this dream did play a role because it brought to my mind the impossibility of keeping a minarchist state. This realization is something that would occasionally launch me deep into depression before I simply used cognitive dissonance to repress the nagging doubt and go on my way. At the time, I couldn’t accept what seemed to me as a total lack of hope because I didn’t realize there was a way outside of the state.
Anyway, Ron Paul led me here and between you guys and the “Top Ten Reasons for Minarchism” over at Anarchyinyourhead.com (which did a good job of rubbing my nose into the inner contradictions of limited government) I became an anarcho-capitalist. While I thought Rothbard was a kook when I first heard about him while taking a tour at the Mises Institute, now I know him as the genius he is.
I couldn’t agree with this more. Since “converting” I’ve achieved far more peace of mind, not less, and you hit the nail on the head as to why.
Also, this thread should be stickied. Partly because it’s so good and partly because people tend to make this topic every now and then, so why not simply make this the official topic for such things?
