I always believed in liberty. I was raised in a protestant Christian home. Both of my parents were republican teachers. I always had a suspicion that Christianity was a little too intolerant of some of the things they considered social ills. They started prohibition, the drug wars, outlawing gay marriage. While I never out right said they were wrong in those aspects, I could never actually find a real argument for those positions. I was finally turned libertarian when I watched the drug war episode of showtime's bullshit in my junior year of college.
Then I played Bioshock . I liked what Andrew Ryan had to say, and I started to develop my own ideas about it. I went on the Penny-Arcade and OCRemix forums of which I had been a member and started debating the ideas I had herd and developed. Someone suggested that it sounded like I had just read Atlas Shrugged, and I didn't know what he was talking about. So I looked up Atlas Shrugged, realized that it was a book one of my friends from college had recommended to me a while back, and started reading it. I started looking online for theory to flesh out some of the theory and I found the Cato institute. I'm still to this day a fan of Patrick J. Michaels and of Jerry Taylor for their analysis on global warming and the oil industry.
I eventually found out about Ron Paul when he was running for president (I was a Romney supporter at the time I watched the bullshit episode). He mentioned the Austrian School and his economic advisor Peter Schiff. I searched for Peter Schiff, and low and behold I found the Peter Schiff was right video. I immediately became a fan of his, and started watching everything he did. I eventually watched him on Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano and guess who showed up on that show. Tom Woods and Lew Rockwell. They made sense and they mentioned The Ludwig Von Mises institute.
Why hadn't I heard of this yet? I had been a libertarian for a year or two now. What happened. So I listened to Tom Woods for a little while, explaining Austrian Theory and it made more sense. He mentioned Rothbard in one of his lectures, whom I had come across before but didn't pay much mind to because he was an anarchist. Then I came across a video called the philosophy of liberty from the book Johnathan Gullible. It all made sense but I couldn't get around some of the problems I saw with anarchy. So I came on the fourms here, asked a few questions about anarchy, Liberty Student suggested I read responses to 10 objections to anarchism, and it rebutted every single one I had and a few more I didn't think of. So I listened to The Ethics of liberty. I recognized an excerpt from it where there was a cartoon Ron Paul talking about the State.
I'm now an anarcho-capitalist trying to convince my dad to become one as well. His only objection so far is that people have the right to have an abortion, and to let their children die by not feeding them. He sees this philosophy as a bubble, and that there's something more that allows people to intervene in this one case.
Walter Block has some audio file on here where he discusses abortion. His view, which I agree with, is for "eviction" rather than abortion. Abortion is eviction plus killing. You can evict a baby but need to do so in the gentlest way possible. Sometimes the gentlest way still kills them, but after about 6 months, it is possible to remove them without killing them because that's the age they can survive being out of the mother's womb.
When it comes to not feeding children, Walter Block also discusses this but I'm not sure if it's in the same audio file. He says this is forestalling others from homesteading. Children are the only case where you have to continually be homesteading. You homestead the right of raising the child by taking care of the child. If you no longer take care of the child, you give up your role as caretaker. You also have to notify others that your child is up for adoption because you're no longer taking care of them, otherwise you're guilty of forestalling homesteading.
In Restraint of State: Walter Block has some audio file on here where he discusses abortion. His view, which I agree with, is for "eviction" rather than abortion. Abortion is eviction plus killing. You can evict a baby but need to do so in the gentlest way possible. Sometimes the gentlest way still kills them, but after about 6 months, it is possible to remove them without killing them because that's the age they can survive being out of the mother's womb. When it comes to not feeding children, Walter Block also discusses this but I'm not sure if it's in the same audio file. He says this is forestalling others from homesteading. Children are the only case where you have to continually be homesteading. You homestead the right of raising the child by taking care of the child. If you no longer take care of the child, you give up your role as caretaker. You also have to notify others that your child is up for adoption because you're no longer taking care of them, otherwise you're guilty of forestalling homesteading.
My discontent with the Republican party and realization that my ideals are more aligned with Libertarian philosophy.
In Restraint of State:Walter Block has some audio file on here where he discusses abortion. His view, which I agree with, is for "eviction" rather than abortion. Abortion is eviction plus killing. You can evict a baby but need to do so in the gentlest way possible. Sometimes the gentlest way still kills them, but after about 6 months, it is possible to remove them without killing them because that's the age they can survive being out of the mother's womb. When it comes to not feeding children, Walter Block also discusses this but I'm not sure if it's in the same audio file. He says this is forestalling others from homesteading. Children are the only case where you have to continually be homesteading. You homestead the right of raising the child by taking care of the child. If you no longer take care of the child, you give up your role as caretaker. You also have to notify others that your child is up for adoption because you're no longer taking care of them, otherwise you're guilty of forestalling homesteading.
Very good summation on the first para, but this last one deserves some minor corrections imo.
http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/block-children.pdf
"Children are the only case where you have to continually be homesteading. You homestead the right of raising the child by taking care of the child. If you no longer take care of the child, you give up your role as caretaker." Is the only thing I have an issue with.
The parents don't own the child, what they own (have first claim to) is Guardianship rights. Block is extending Rothbard's analysis in Chapter 14 of TEOL.
I've always been a rampant individualist. I loathed groups, I despised coercion, I hated anything forced upon me on the basis that a foreign party 'knew what was best for me'. For a long time, this never manifested itself onto any deeper plane of thinking and I was never a troublemaker of any sort... but the seeds of vicious malcontent were planted, and would refuse to wither from then on out. School is undoubtedly the thing in which every embittered, anti-social, and nihilistic sentiment I've ever felt as arisen, and I've never wanted anything to do it (reminds me of a quote from Karl Hess: "Find someone who will rebel against public-education laws and you will have a worthy rebel indeed"). I had no hatred for learning, I enjoyed it a lot. At the time, I very much loved listening to my father talk about greek mythology and history in general. We bump heads from time to time (perhaps there will be more on that later), but he taught me more and gave me more drive to better myself (so I could be better than him, thats something I've always wanted to do. Beat him).
Being a young'un, of course, I had no political clue or ideological base. I just knew I hated school and all of its trappings. I felt reform was necessary, though I had no idea what that reform would be. It was a gut feeling-- something needed to change. It was in the seventh grade I got my first taste for politics, for that was the year I first read Orwell's 1984. Henceforth, I always had a severe distrust for any government plan or action or motive. I began to take more interest in politics, but found myself too conflicted for my own good. I was only aware of the republican/democrat dichotomy... but I found myself interested in neither. The Democratic party was more to my favor due to social positions on the likes of homosexuals, opposition to the death penalty, legalization of weed, opposition to the war, and the wish to give the money back to the working man. I had no conception of economics, but I was always told America was capitalistic and I saw quite easily the concentration of wealth I would later recognize as corporatism. Even still, though I had a distrust for capitalism, the mentioning of free markets and property rights and all the other stuff (that they don't really mean) invoked that individualistic gut-feeling that I had felt when considering schooling... except it was a positive feeling. It all probably sounds contradicting and conflicted, but remember I was still in middle school.
In the ninth grade, my next intellectual jump was made when I read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. I was completely and utterly sucked into this novel, it was for me what Atlas Shrugged was for most people. The individualistic part of me that always sat in my gut was finally allowed to come out and truly live. As I learned more about Rand and Objectivism, I grew a little disdainful of her. However, the individualism so long supressed by school was freed at last. I couldn't destroy it even if I tried. I realized that there is nothing wrong with greed or self-interest, that capitalism is moral, and that distrust for government I first had in the seventh grade became an unfettered hatred. That sentiment for school reform transformed into a desire for school emancipation, for private learning. Still, I had a long way to go. I still had no means of representing myself politically, no real foundation, no real history, no real facts that could save me from emotional economics and statist trickery. I still had no political body that could properly represent me... and then (YOU GUESSED IT) Ron Paul ran for president! This guy was the MAN. Seriously, this guy had everything I ever wanted but was never fully aware of. I didn't agree with everything, no. Still don't. But I liked it all the same. When he spoke about economics, the rest of the republican nominees went silent. I knew I'd have to follow this guy. However, ironically, I didn't find the Austrian School through Ron Paul. I discovered his ties here after I had found out about the school.
Now its time for tenth grade. For a brief period, I found myself in a deep apathy, overcome by a seemingly intense nihilism. It isn't uncommon, during the school year, for me to undergo these spells of apathy... but this one was oddly intense. I don't think it was caused by anything more than the increased amount of time the tenth grade forced me to give to school... so I wasted a lot of time. But, this was a really big year for me. It was this year I found both Nietzsche and Max Stirner, who were much better than Rand (I had grown less fond of her over the summer after reading more of her work and learning of her... reputation). Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains, undoubtedly, the greatest text I've ever read in my life. When I open up Nietzsche, my entire being goes into a deep meditative trance that I can't shake myself out of for the life of me. The Ego and its Own is also one of the best books I've ever read and made me acknowledge myself a bit more as an egoist and a philosophical anarchist (which I think, in a way, I always was). I've probably read more books in the tenth grade than I have in all my other years combined. I was finally developing a philosophical and ideological base for myself. I could make more sense of the things I read and I was able to refute them if I deemed it necessary. I read Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, Albert Camus, Homer, Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx, Chernyshevsky, Russell, Conrad, Hugo, Heller, Vonnegut, Gentile, James Joyce, Foucault, Heidegger, Dostoyevksy, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spencer, Thoreau, Voltaire, Jefferson, Locke, Hume, Machiavelli, Malthus, Hobbes, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel (well, I read him... understanding him truly is something else), Godwin, Mill, Burke, and then, yes... the Austrian School (note: my grades suffered quite a bit...). I first discovered them via the socialist calculation debate and I read Ludwig von Mises' Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth and understood it a lot better than I thought I would. I was sold though. I hated every word of Marx I came across (though I'm absolutely OBSESSED with Marxism. Its beyond crazy), and I just loved this. I continued to read Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson", Bastiat's "The Law", Menger's Principles, and whatever Rothbard article I could find on Mises.org or LewRockwell. It was around summertime I began to fully contemplate market anarchism. I did my best to find holes in it, and I often thought I had (even though I really didn't want to find any holes, I really wanted to accept it as true). I began to focus more on those linked with anarcho-capitalism... and I came across Lysander Spooner's "No Treason." I would go on to read Molinari and Tucker... while getting a deeper reading of Rothbard. But it was No Treason that did it. I was always sympathetic, even as a boy, to the South even though I abhor slavery. No Treason forced me to recognize the quaintness of the constitution and the despotism by ballot forced on us. The last couple of months have simply been a quest in expanding the size and scope of my knowledge concerning this new concrete base. I've still got so much to learn, but at least now I feel I have a real direction.
The biggest thing I probably need to learn is how to control my temper. Anything endorsing any existence, task, or action of any monopoly on security sends me into fits. The worst is when I find them trapped and they try and opt out, while still holding their erroneous position. Among friends I'm more capable of recognizing the fact that I need to let them go and hope they're thinking... but I feel so agitated when a discourse abruptly stops before any one party proves its opposition incorrect. I have a hard time not addressing statism, social contracts, nationalism, and taxation without insulting the other person. I know thats really bad... but its such a sleazy and immoral thought process... crime is alright as long as it is done so collectively! The recognition of this line of thought has probably made to me more clear than ever that archists are all the same when it comes to the root of it. Oh... this is extortion, but this emotional appeal is necessary! I like this, but any more is too much. Etc. It sickens me. Who in the hell are they to say when they are perfectly justified in stealing from me? I realize they don't even understand it like that. We are the government! All of us! This has caused me to look at my father with a bit of disgust (I feel a tad ashamed in saying that). All the archists are the same... they all believe in slavery. The difference is only the degree, the difference exists only in the weight of the shackles you're bound in. Freedom is the only absolute. If Freedom is a river, it is one that could never be dammed up or diverted. Those in the shackles of their statist slavery simply sink to the bottom of it. The saddest part is that they hold their own key.
My personal Anarcho-Capitalist flag. The symbol in the center stands for "harmony" and "protection"-- I'm hoping to illustrate the bond between order/justice and anarchy.
Someone should create a poll as to how you became libertarian. I suspect that at least a large minority was influenced by Ron Paul in some way or another (including me), I'm just curious as to how much...
Robbery: The nation's fastest growing career!
Duties: Giving the people their bread and circuses, extracting payment by force, validating legitimacy, etc.
Job Outlook: Ever increasing and shows no signs of stopping!
You simply restated what I said. In the very sentence of mine you quoted, I said that "you give up your role as caretaker" not as owner. I use guardian/caretaker interchangably, as they are they same thing. I never said children were owned by their parents.
Ron Paul.
I started of as a socialist, because of the rampant anti-thatcherism I saw in the after labour came in in '97, I grew up thinking that those on the left were the good guys and those on the right were the bad guys, in the ignorance of youth. At college I was one of the only left wing people I knew (other than the hilarious, communist history teacher, Big Red John). One of my friends was a full anarchist and introduced me to this site. He kept poking holes in my arrogant ignorance, but it was that the government could tell me, at 17 when I hadn't voted, what I was allowed to do that really got me thinking. Then I thought, what about all the people who are in the minority at elections as well? The government tells them what to do?! Then it was only a small step to anarchy. And I've never looked back. I still think it would be good if people shared some of their money with each other, but I'm against forcing that to happen, so I've changed from: the needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few, to; the rights of one out weigh the needs of all.
Macroeconomics didn't make sense to me and I was then very interested in a political career. Thought about reading Friedman's "Monetray History", as Friedman seemed clearer in his thoughts back than. Instead, I ran into Rothbard's "Monetary History" and found it intersting. Read more Rothbard, than Human Action, than more austrian schools authors and I slowly "degenerated" into an anarchist. Molyneux finally got my wish for a politcal career to fade.
I went from fascism based around plato's theory of government to anarchism (tenatively) by asking what if the philosopher king realized that the state wasn't necessary?
From that question I got into economics and here I am today.