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! :)
What drove you over the edge?
EDIT: clarity
Don't allow leftists to play games with definitions! Some of the libertarian-leaning leftists at this forum will try to redefine "left-wing" back to its original defition (Third Estate, limited government, free-markets, laissez-faire reforms, etc.). Fine! We non-leftists can't stop them from using their own personal definitions; they can use whatever labels they want to describe any concept they want.However, they have the audacity to then use their personal definition of "left-wing" (remember, the original definition, which is no longer valid) to prove that modern leftists are more libertarian than modern rightists! They will say that libertarianism is "inherently leftist" (again, using the original, no longer valid definition), and use that to insist that we should prefer and side with modern leftists over modern rightists.
Question their motives.
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.
...And nobody has ever taught you how to live out on the street, But now you're gonna have to get used to it...
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.
Pro Christo et Libertate integre!
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.
"The plans differ; the planners are all alike"
-Bastiat
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.
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. " -- Samuel Adams.
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.
"I cannot prove, but am prepared to affirm, that if you take care of clarity in reasoning, most good causes will take care of themselves, while some bad ones are taken care of as a matter of course." -Anthony de Jasay
The love of wealth.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power
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.
http://www.comebackalive.com/phpBB2 Travel, Adventure Travel, Arguments, Recipes.
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.
Thanks.
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.
Ego: Now that you are all libertarian, does anyone still listen to talk radio?
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!
Ego:Now that you are all libertarian, does anyone still listen to talk radio?
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.
I hate correcting on spelling, but I see this mistake too often... it's laissez-faire. It's not even pronounced lazze-faire, less-faire etc. It is pronounced like 'less', only with an 'e' at the end in the case of the first word and 'fair' in the case of the second, with the French 'r'.
ViennaSausage: 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.
Yeah, me too, long before I ever heard the term "libertarian", etc. Only when I discovered the Internet in the mid-80's did I find other people who thought the same way... (but the only Austrian I ever heard of was Hayek until something led me to mises.org - that was maybe 2002 or 2003)
I don't ever remember not being a "libertarian", though I admit not knowing or caring what that word meant until recently (and I still don't really care so much).
Now that I have found the virtually unlimited treasure trove of audio available on Mises.org, I almost never listen to talk radio anymore. I can't stand Hannity any longer, he is such a schill. Sometimes he has good guests, but since he doesn't let them talk much, it's not worth it.
Rush is occasionally interesting, but once you've listened long enough, you know what he is going to say. There's only so much defense of W I can take. Savage is at least somewhat radical and that makes him interesting. I used to agree with his position on Iraq, which was fight to win or go home, with the emphasis on fight to win. Now I am more inclined to the latter.
My journey towards libertarianism started 12 years ago. At that time I was strongly Conservative in the minarchist sense and believed in a limited but strong defense. After W completely abandoned anything that looked like a limited government position, I started looking for something closer to my philosophy. Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty shook my world last summer. I am still recovering and finding myself becoming more and more persuaded by the consistency and logic of his position. Not totally convinced on anarchism yet, but I believe it is probably better than the alternatives.
I can't get away from this site. Thanks to all the great contributors and people who run LVMI, there is always more information available. As an added bonus, it's actually intellectual and based on logic and reason. Wish law school had been more like this. Heck, I wish legal opinions were more like this.
I used to be a conservative liberal, then I found some libertarians. They explained how the market works to me (I used to think businesses were out to get everyone). However, they did not tell me they were libertarians. I eventually found out about libertarians, studied about them more, and eventually found The Future of Freedom Foundation. A little while after I searched for more organizations and found CATO, NCPA, FEE and Mises, and signed up for all of their daily emails. Recently I have dropped CATO and added Lewrockwell.com. My education is pretty much completely an internet education. I have yet to really read any books.
At most, I think only 5% of the adult population would need to stop cooperating to have real change.
Inquisitor: I hate correcting on spelling, but I see this mistake too often... it's laissez-faire. It's not even pronounced lazze-faire, less-faire etc. It is pronounced like 'less', only with an 'e' at the end in the case of the first word and 'fair' in the case of the second, with the French 'r'.
Thanks for correcting the spelling. I almost always misspell that word. And thanks for the correct pronunciation too! I have only read the word as it is not a ubiquitous spoken vernacular word.
Ego: What drove you over the edge?
Nothing "drove" me over the edge. I was apolitical until I discovered libertarianism. Rand's "For The New Intellectual" was my turning point.
But I do have a pet peeve: mandatory seatbelt laws.
Twirlcan: 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.
That makes shivers run down my back just thinking about it. It's spooky being at an event like that, being the only one to notice the evils of the state.
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
I'll answer a somewhat different question: what radicalized you as a libertarian? Because I may have been a "Big L" libertarian and a minarchist for a while, but I was eventually pushed over the edge into more radical territory (I.E. anarchism and apolitical libertarianism). So here are my answers:
1. Herbert Spencer's "Social Statics". It helped convince me that the state will eventually be rendered obsolete through social evolution. This idea was an important first step pointing me in the direction of libertarian anarchism. Furthermore, the chapter "The Right To Ignore The State" has blatantly anarchistic implications.
2. Debating with Objectivists and proponents of "subscribed government". I first encountered the idea of "subscribed government" when I was a minarchist, and I argued that the idea was absurd because it would not truly constitute a government at all. I ran into cognitive dissonance upon exploring and debating the idea and soon realized that my own principles inevitably leads to the abandonment of "government" as it is commonly understood. I ended up "converting" an Objectivist to a market anarchist in the process, even when I was still confused about it myself.
3. Stefan Molyneux's podcasts on minarchism and anarchism (and how they relate to ethics). I find Stefan's emphasis on consistancy and universality to be very compelling. Radicalism and consistancy go hand in hand. Molyneux makes it very clear that minarchism is highly inconsistant and hypocritical. He debunks statism from an ethical perspective and it was ultimately ethical considerations (and the weeding out of ethical inconsistancies) that drove me towards libertarian anarchism.
4. Debating with moderate libertarians. The more I debated with such people, the more disgusted I became with mainstream libertarianism and the party, and the more I became convinced that the political approach is futile and self-contradictary. In a profound sense, the spinelessness and inconsistancy of the moderates drove me towards radicalism.
5. The immigration debate. My opposition to border enforcement lead me down the path of rejecting political borders in general, and hence inevitably in an anarchist direction. I could never wrap my head around the idea of "national sovereignty", as the only sovereignty I can recognize is that of the individual. Nationalist sentiments have always struck me as collectivistic and irrational.
6. Introduction to the ideas of agorism. Enough said.
wuzacon:I can't get away from this site. Thanks to all the great contributors and people who run LVMI, there is always more information available. As an added bonus, it's actually intellectual and based on logic and reason.
I second that. I do not comment on this site often as I am relatively new to libertarianism and do not believe I can yet play a hand. However, I am on here just about every day and enjoy and appreciate the discussions.
As I said I am still very much developing. However, what got me questioning government from the start was Thomas DiLorenzo and John Stossel. DiLo showed Stossel's "John Stossel Goes to Washinton" on the first day of his Intermediate Micro class and I couldn't stop thinking about it. However, it wasn't until Ron Paul that I became obsessed with learning more about the fundamentals and exposing the state's influence on myself. More a very long while I was angry and could not understand how people like Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul remained so calm and collective. I have sinced relaxed...
Although I must say, I have always been libertarian at heart. From a young age I never understood political correctness and felt many fallacies were perpetuated in part because of it.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV. And you think you're so clever and class less and free. But you're still f***ing peasants as far as I can see.
There's room at the top they are telling you still. But first you must learn how to smile as you kill, if you want to be like the folks on the hill.
classiclib: That makes shivers run down my back just thinking about it. It's spooky being at an event like that, being the only one to notice the evils of the state.
A friend of my family (now dead) went to Germany as a tourist in 1936 and attended one of those rallies. He said that it was dead silent during those events and that all you could hear was all the boots marching in unison. He said he was the only tourist in his group that was worried after wittnessing it.
Brainpolice:The immigration debate. My opposition to border enforcement lead me down the path of rejecting political borders in general, and hence inevitably in an anarchist direction. I could never wrap my head around the idea of "national sovereignty", as the only sovereignty I can recognize is that of the individual. Nationalist sentiments have always struck me as collectivistic and irrational.
I completely agree with your stance on immigration, and I have pretty much felt that way for as long as I can remember. The idea of immigration status bogles my mind.
As to the inconsistency of minarchism, I have definitely come to understand that more recently. Regardless, I would still prefer a minimalist government to the massive one we currently have. I think there is definitely a moral difference between stealing trillions of dollars vs. millions of dollars. They are both theft, however, the smaller theft causes much less suffering than the larger theft.
Immigration and citizenship laws certainly must go... but they must not go first. As long as we still have elections in which you can vote yourself money, we can't allow mobs of leftists to move in and reverse and progress.
I wanted to ascribe to an ideology that would support my right to run through the streets naked with green jello all over my body while reading Playboy magazine.
MacFall: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.
Or it was something very much like this.
Corporations are an extension of the state.
Rich333:I wanted to ascribe to an ideology that would support my right to run through the streets naked with green jello all over my body while reading Playboy magazine.
Well, as long as you own the streets, then you have found the right place.
Rich333: I wanted to ascribe to an ideology that would support my right to run through the streets naked with green jello all over my body while reading Playboy magazine. MacFall: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. Or it was something very much like this.
LMAO!
My history is kind of weird, because i was a neocon being an argentinian...
Yeah, thats wierd, isn't it?
Well, that's have an answer and was the love that I had to your great country, their founders, their presidents, their costume of freedmon, etc,
But it was that love for America that drag me to the neoconservative ideologic system. Because I needed justifications for america's actions around the worlds, due to the importante hate rounding here about America (mainly for cultural reasons, and historicals). I needed to justify the invasion of iraq, vietnam war, interventions in everywhere, mainly because I though america was defending freedmon, and people here wasn't getting the right thing...
Well, after being a argentinian neocon (almost one year). And please imagine that in my country, where 9 of 10 practically want to make America blow up, was a harsh problem. I started reading different articles in Mises, LRC, Reason, etc, and my points of view radically change. How could I be favoring such a blood thing like war!! But I was totally blind in my love for America...
You may think I am kind of idiot for loving another country, but that's because living here is such a hard thing when the state is everywhere. If you hate us state, that's why you did't fell the argentinian one...
I want to make something clear, I always was pro market, pro liberty, but this neocon thing was prrety illogical.
I still love your country, but only the pre-lincoln era. :)
Welcome to the forum, jackbas!
How is the political landscape in Argentina? Would you say that socialists are more popular than capitalists?
Ego: Welcome to the forum, jackbas!
I second this motion.
Inconsistancies in rhetoric drove me to libertarianism. I could not oppose organizations like the UN if I argued the validity of state intervention in Iraq based on their laws.
I also couldn't champion the constitution.
Then Ron Paul started his campaign and I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he had to say. I was your typical Paleo, and was quite nationalist. Then I adopted an ideology of constitutional minarchy (where the federal government would only function to unify state interest but not have power over economic or military transactions [Kind of like the Articles of the Confederation]) which slowly morphed into an idea of a minarchy that would function off the voluntary economic transactions of its citizens (donations and bonds) but have no control over the marketplace. (I kind of thought that under a system like this, necessary war would probably be better funded out of individual fear that the state was underfunded because it lacked the means to fund itself and people would therefore give more money than under taxation). But pretty soon I just became an agorist.
It seems to me the Iraq War has created a bigger libertarian movement. Bad management on the state's part.