Confessions of a former Libertarian: My personal, psychological and intellectual epiphany
SUNDAY, JAN 26, 2014 04:00 AM PST
Confessions of a former Libertarian: My personal, psychological and intellectual epiphany
I was a Buddhist concerned with world suffering -- and I could no longer reconcile my humanity with my ideology
SCOTT PARKER
What’s interesting to me now is not why this kind of thinking is wrong but why it was once so attractive to me.
I found my way to libertarianism in my teen years when I began reading some of its introductory texts and was attracted to the internal consistency of its policies. If you accepted that the individual was sacrosanct and the government’s only role was to protect the individual, everything else pretty much followed. Unlike mainstream liberalism and conservatism, which were constantly engaged in negotiations between social and economic freedoms, libertarianism was systematically clean and neat. So much so that I quickly stopped concerning myself with how ideas played out in the world. The ideas themselves were enough.
As a kid, you learn to refute anyone’s “theory” by snidely mocking — “In theory, communism works.” When I was in college, I knew that communism did not work, even in theory, and I was happy to tell you why.
Only libertarianism worked in theory.
More here:
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/26/confessions_of_a_former_libertarian_my_personal_psychological_and_intellectual_epiphany/