My name is Christopher Barcelo. During the course of my life I have been in many different standings. As a kid I was a pure anarchist that didn't believe in the need of the state at all to being around the time of September 11th a firm social democrat and fiscal conservative supporting the Iraq / Afghanistan conflict as our liberty was reportedly under attack. It is only a matter of time however when one of such thinking is forced to conflict within himself or herself. You can only believe in the individual and advocate for it's restriction to a certain extent when your ideals will come to a stand off. It was at this time I was poking around and I came across Milton Friedman, yes Milton...
I agreed with everything he said about personal liberty and the big government etc. I saw many of the problems this can create in our current economic situation as well as my daily life and the lives and concerns of my friends, family, and community. When I started to do further research and learning I came across Ron Paul, the Champion of Liberty, who then led me to Mises, Rothbard, and the the rest is history (especially the blind support of Friedman's approach).
Just as I couldn't support a preempted war under the notion that it was to preserve my freedom as well as spread it to other places, which we basically destroy in the process; I couldn't possibly support economic thought that says in order to protect the individual in the market we must destroy him and remove that which empowers the idea of individuality. Freedom and liberty imply an opposite condition in which the individual does not know their meaning, it implies the existence of coercion and violence. The inevitability of the existence of the two states thus demands the existence of the State to balance the power. The state should be used only in accordance to protect the existence of liberty and restrain the threat of coercion and violence so that the individual can prosper and reach his potential unhampered and then free.
Freedom is not a possible notion without taking into account what is free and from what is it free. Thanks to people and thinkers such as Ron Paul, Mises, Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, and many of the Austrian School I can feel like this is being pondered. I can believe there is hope for these ideals. While the doctrine is not yet perfected and while it may not be within my lifetime I am excited to be a part of it, which consequently excites me of the future - which under previous thought I was feeling doomed.