I do not know the source of the quote; "If you have not been a socialist by the age of eighteen, you have no heart. But if you are not a capitalist by the age of thirty, you have no head." I am very happy with that quote as it gets gives me some small excuse for where my head was during most of my teens. In my defense I was raised by socialists, and my mind did not escape their confines until I was on my own.
It was a girlfriend of mine who exposed to me the error in my thinking, not by arguing with me but by simply suggesting a book I aught read. I was very much in love with this woman and took her advice very seriously. So when at the age of ninteen, I read 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand, I was utterly devastated by how wrong I had been. I had never given more than passing thought to economics and that ignorance on my part had led me to espouse the absolute evil of the cultural revolution in China. I resolved to never be guilty of such a crime again, and went back to school, studying business administration, law and economics. Ultimately I concentrated most upon economics.
I was utterly lost for many weeks when I started in both mico and macro economics (took both concurrently). I was utterly stymied by their excuses for math, symbols and graphs so obtuse as to occult any possibility of true understanding. Most students are happy to simply memorize and regurgitate for exams (and promptly forget everything when the course is over), but I have never been able to do that. I have always relied on understanding a subject, and economics utterly eluded me. What I was being taught made no sense.
Then I got lucky. I happened to catch a radio talk show that featured someone critical of the government, who was talking economics. Somehow, despite me at the time failing economics, I completely understood everything this guy was talking about. Unlike all my teachers, this guy made sense! Within a minute of the end of this radio program, I was on the phone with the radio station, tracking this fellow down. Ultimately he invited me, this largely ignorant teenager, over for dinner. He spent hours talking to me about all sorts of things I did not understand, mentioning people I had never heard of, the first time I ever heard the names of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard...
I went home that night with an arm full of books he lent to me. The next few days I saw no light of day as my nose was buried in the likes of 'Economics in One Lesson' by Henry Hazlitt. When I finally went back to class, everything was different. I still had not a clue how those crazy formulas worked, but I could understand the questions, and from there, the answers were obvious. I instantaneously went from failing grades to getting significantly higher marks than had been seen in that college in many years. Ultimately the college hired me to run their economics resource center and be their official economics tutor.
I actually wound up running as a Libertarian Candidate in an election shortly thereafter, though shamefully I did not take it seriously. I needed two hundred signatures for my nomination, so in one evening, I knocked on 200 doors. That was all the campaigning I did as I was simply a fill in candidate, the tenth candidate, so the party would be recognized in my province as a party as opposed to nine independents. It turned out that the only media attention they ever got that election was voting day when alone among the Libertarian candidates, my name kept popping up when they reported riding results. The reporters kept having to stumble through their pronunciation of 'Libertarian' as I garnered all of 200 votes, enough to come in third, beating eight other candidates. It took me a long while to realize that if I had multiplied that 200 doors by morning, afternoon and evening, by 45 days, I might have carried the election.
That was thirty years ago. I have done relatively little study of economics since then and in fact have gotten rather rusty in my understanding. I have spoken since then, I have changed minds, I have written the odd letter, I have called into radio talk shows, I have donated money where I could. But I have not done anywhere near enough to do justice to those who fought in the past to give us what freedoms we do enjoy. And now we find ourselves where we are. My generation, and my father's, have saddled the youth of today with a yoke and a debt that is virtually impossible for them to shed, for them to pay. And still most of us preach still more of the same.
I have been starting to wake up again as this current crisis has loomed. I have been brushing up, reading new books, re-reading some old ones. Mises YouTube videos have been a huge boon, as have many other web resources. I am now often debating in various forums, getting involved in long threads defending the Austrian position. But there is still much I should learn. My answers to questions do not come anywhere near as easily as they do to the likes of Tom Woods or Peter Schiff, and I am not content.
I am hoping to avail myself of the forums here to ask questions and to get feedback and guidance on essays I write. I am not a professional economist, but I very much do not want to say anything in an essay that is in error.