My Political History
I am a liberal anarchist, and I reached this point in my political thinking rather quickly. I grew up fairly apathetic. I don't believe I understood what it meant to be a liberal or a conservative until reading the definition in my AP Government class in high school. I also remember being quite confused. The textbook defined a conservative as wanting the government to be mostly benign with economic issues but heavily involved with personal morality, whereas a liberal wanted it to be heavily involved with economic issues and mostly benign with personal morality. Well... what if you thought it should be benign with both? Eventually I learned that was the position of the libertarian. And then I was satisfied - I knew what all the names were!
It was in that high school Government class that I came to really appreciate the Founders, particularly Madison. Federalism is brilliant! I thought. Instead of trying to suppress man's corrupted nature, you exploit it to maintain an honest system! I don't know if I was simply infatuated with the Founders, but it was around the same time I moved from skeptical Catholic to Deist. If it was good enough for Paine and Jefferson, it was good enough for me. I started to form a political identity, one that might best be called Ignorant Constitutionalist. (not because Constitutionalism is ignorant, but because I don't think I had a fully formed, internally consistent philosophy)
I continued my confusion/apathy into college. I knew I disliked Bush, but didn't see anything too great about the Democrats. Both seemed so damn excited: everything has to have a political solution. And the solutions for all the big things were the same: do it better. Fight the war better and get it done. Come down harder on drug use. Spend more on education. It was only on the small things that there was any kind of meaningful disagreement: abortion, gay marriage, marginal tax rates versus marginal spending. There was no talk of the Constitution, no consideration of abdicating authority to the states and local governments, no appreciation of the federalist system and the idea of a weak federal government.
I could understand why so many people didn't vote: the whole thing is ridiculous. I figured most Americans were like me and didn't bother with politics.
And then the 2008 election geared up... in 2007. And, perhaps thanks to the Daily Show, I learned of Ron Paul's performance in a May 2007 debate. I learned he spoke common sense about the September 11 attacks. I learned he actually wanted to do something different. And I learned he mentioned the Constitution. I caught up on the debates on YouTube, found some online communities discussing him, and eventually found my way to lewrockwell.com. And that is when things started to change.
Working as a clerk 40 hours a week for the entire summer, I had plenty of time to read LRC's daily articles and work my way through the archive. By the end of the summer I was a devout advocate of a limited US government, with humble foreign and domestic policies. Abolish the Fed. Abolish the standing army. Rectify injustice and deter crime - that's all I thought government needed to accomplish.
It took me about a year of casual reading and careful thinking to question if the government even needed to do that. I was convinced the state was an unjust institution, that taxes were morally dubious if not outright theft, and that the social contract was a bunch of crock. But could order really be maintained with a competitive market for law and justice? I was finally turned by the original argument for a 'free market in law': Molinari's The Production of Society. I simply could not refute his arguments.
Two years later, I feel much more confident and even more convinced.