I’m from Michigan, originally. I’ve intuitively embraced free-markets since about 2006, when I was about 25. This was also when I began actively trading stocks and options, which lead me to a serious appreciation of the beauty of the price mechanism. I moved to Alabama for a job promotion in the fall of 2008, and I used my 2 years of relative isolation there to educate myself in Austrian Economics by reading books and viewing YouTube lectures by various people like MIses, Hans Hoppe, Murray Rothbard, Tom Woods, Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Tom DiLorenzo, Peter Schiff, etc.
So, in my 2 years in Alabama, I fully formulated my convictions regarding the logical truths of Austrian Economics and the ethics of Libertarianism. Over time, I’ve found that philosophically I can only identify myself as an Anarcho-Capitalist. Luckily, I always had my hot-headed, intensely statist younger brother on whom to test my arguments. He’s smart enough that I left every debate with several points in my argument that needed refining and re-examination, while the same was clearly true for him – he’s has said several times that most of his knowledge of economics has come about through debating me.
In general, I feel that I have developed a more or less infallible argument for free-markets, which I generally present in either an ethical or pragmatic manner, or both, depending on whom I am speaking with. I can easily explain to any statist that their notion of government as the basis of society is deeply flawed, and can illustrate the reality of the division of labor as the basis of society. However, I’ve also realized that no one ever convinced me of what I now know. I sought out this knowledge because I had the curiosity to seek it out. I've come to believe that it is unlikely that I will ever convince anyone of what I know unless they are internally seeking that knowledge.