My mom was Catholic and my dad was a marine, so I basically leaned right growing up. I used to not think so much about this stuff. I trusted George W Bush. I didn’t know any better.
When people on here mentioned Ron Paul and I saw the clip of him telling Giuliani ‘they attack us because we’re over there,’ it changed my life. It really did. It was like opening my eyes for the first time. Eventually he dropped out so I voted for Ralph Nader and left the rest empty. To be honest I didn't know any of the local candidates and probably wouldn’t like them even if I did.
A few years later Wikileaks published then-Private Bradley Manning’s leaks on the Iraq War. This was another formative experience for me. If you’ve never sat down and watched the collateral murder video, you should. Wikileaks was a window to a better world. We could have saved ourselves if we’d punished the Bush administration for their criminal war. Now they get booked on MSNBC and Fox News, & hired by the Trump admin while Assange dies in prison.
Some time later I realized that govts use violence to extort money from people to fund programs I find abhorrent, and they do it without our consent. The real nature of state power is to metastasize and entrench itself. It doesn’t matter how “small” the govt is. There is no perfect system where we don’t have to deal with the innate violence of the human race. The question is if decentralized systems are better for pushing back against the concentration of power. I think they are. But governing people only with their explicit consent, to the extent they want to be governed at all, is a foundationally moral position. Remember, the personality type most drawn to power tends to be a sociopath.
Now I’d consider myself a market anarchist, or a voluntaryist. I’ve been here for years. Tim likes to say I’m a left anarchist, I’m pretty ok with that too. It’s always subject to change. I don’t know what the correct arrangement for private property is- maybe there is something to the mutualist idea of only having a claim to land you actually use.
Unfortunately, there is no option to vote for the system to abolish itself. Now that the USA experiment has failed, perhaps we can get real about other approaches to civic structures.