A few posts back I began talking about my journey into the world of libertarianism, and today I've decided to avoid all the negativity in the news and the entire circus act of the first Republican debate and tell you exactly why I came to be a libertarian, and why I stay.
I've already explained to you that I came to learn a lot of what I know about being a libertarian through Ayn Rand's books and philosophy of Objectivism. As I mention in my post about "Freedom and Liberty vs Death and Taxes," I never could quite reconcile Rand's philosophy with my upbringing. I agree with most of what Rand said, but the idea that religion is anathema, along with a few other issues, really kept me at a distance.
As I also mentioned, my Government teacher in 12th grade suggested I may be a Libertarian, so I began following the Libertarian Party on Twitter (when I actually started using Twitter, which was sometime in college). I saw that they posted a lot of articles from a magazine called Reason, so I began following a few different Reason accounts on Twitter as well. This is what ultimately led me down the rabbit hole.
Twitter caused my transformation into a full Libertarian. As I mentioned above, I didn't start using it in high school because I thought it was stupid, but I toyed around with it in college because most of the people I knew were on it. I ended up with an account that hardly follows anything but news sources, libertarian publications and accounts, and a few politicians. As time went on, Twitter would recommend that I follow new accounts, and at one point it was recommended that I follow the We Are Libertarians account. I had been following this account for quite some time with little to no interaction before my wife and I decided to drive cross country. The day we left, I had noticed a Tweet about a new Podcast episode, which I was previously unaware of, and decided to download it and listen to it in the car. I figured I had 38 hours to kill, so what was the harm? Besides, one of my friends had been suggesting that I start listening to podcasts on my commutes for a while now, so I was already predisposed to the idea.
Well, this is really the time when I fully began to come into my ideas. I started with an episode somewhere in the 90s of their catalog (though for the life of me now I can't remember which episode it was exactly. I think it had something to do with Ferguson as that was a hot topic at the time and it seemed like something I wanted to learn more about). Needless to say, I quickly became hooked. I went back through their entire catalog and listened to every single one of their episodes. I've also started listening to the other podcasts produced by We Are Libertarians, even though the main one is the only one that's still producing new content. Once I completed their catalog, I began branching out to other podcasts recommended by them and by the Stitcher app, which I had downloaded to listen to We Are Libertarians when I heard in one of their episodes that the podcast was available on that service.
At any rate, the last 6 months of my life have really been eye opening for me. I've been reading more news, challenging myself more with different ideas, and not just libertarian ones. I've come to feel so strongly about my libertarian ideas that 6 or so weeks ago I decided to start my own blog to expound them. I know that most of the time I've been fairly negative, which I would prefer to avoid but I have trouble with because of the current climate of our country. So much going on right now upsets me that I feel the need to speak out against it.
That leaves me with an attempt to explain to you, dear reader, why libertarianism?
As I heard the other day on the Tom Wood's Show episode 461 (I think), "If I really hated poor people, I would wish Socialism upon them." I told you last week that Bernie Sanders scares the crap out of me because he speaks so loudly for Socialist ideas, and people stand behind him. We already know that Communism doesn't work, and Socialism is honestly not hugely different from Communism on paper. In fact, we cannot deny that, since the American Revolution and the idea that government should get out of the way and let people live as they might, there has been a radical shift in the standard of living of people across the globe. As explained in the Forbes article I just linked to, the increased wages, life spans, and mobility of even the poorest people can all be credited to free market forces driving up the standard of living for everyone.
I think next time I'll touch on the ideas of income inequality and wage redistribution, which are key arguments that people like Bernie Sanders make to gain support. In the mean time, I want to end this as positively as possible.
I believe in Free Market Capitalism and the libertarian ideas that follow because I know that, if left alone, people generally can make good choices for themselves. Theses choices aggregate to the betterment of all people, especially the poorest of people. The best example of this would be the people living at or below the poverty level as designated by the government here in the US: they probably have at least one TV in their house/apartment, as well as cell phones, a building to live in, more than one set of clothing to wear, etc. Poor people in many other parts of the world live in tents or mud houses without electricity, plumbing, or many of the amenities that most of us take for granted. If we as a people want to continue increasing the standard of living of everyone, we need to continue pushing for free market ideals and get the government to stay out of our way.
No comments:
Post a Comment