Confessions of a Former Statist
I never thought I’d become a libertarian. For most of my life, I thought of libertarianism as nothing more than a weirdo political party. I had no inkling that it was the grand social philosophy that I now know it to be.
Before college I was basically apolitical. Going to UC Berkeley predictably made me a leftist, although I never embraced full socialism. I initially chose to minor in education for the homely reason of wanting to be a good parent someday. But my activist education professors quickly imparted to me a savior complex. My bible was Jonathan Kozol’s fiery book Savage Inequalities. And my dream was to save the world by using big government to reform public schooling: especially by making its funding and administration more centralized.
After interviewing a city councilman for the People’s Republic of Berkeley for a class assignment, I was appointed to the city’s “Community Health Commission.” In one meeting, I remember pushing the horrific idea of extorting a local large private hospital into providing more free service to the poor by holding hostage its license to operate. Fortunately, the left-liberal city staffer assigned to the commission correctly identified the idea as insane and quashed it. Bullet dodged. Thankfully I never was able to do any real damage in my brief career as a “community health commissioner.”
I was such a rampant statist that, in spite of being a leftist, I wasn’t even anti-war: which is one of the redeeming stances of the best of the left. This was true even after I graduated and had begun exploring ideas on my own. On March 16, 2003, days before the beginning of the Iraq War, I happened to be on campus–I still lived in Berkeley and worked for the university. In a school cafe, I watched President Bush give Saddam Hussein and his sons an ultimatum to flee Iraq within 48 hours on pain of war. A news crew was there to get student reactions on camera. I eagerly approached the reporter and offered to give my perspective. I assumed that all the students interviewed were opposed to the war, and that my pro-war perspective would be welcomed as a novelty. He brushed me off by saying something along the lines, “Oh this campus is full of warmongers.” I had come perilously close to promoting the onset of one of the most evil wars in US history on broadcast television. Another bullet dodged.
Ironically, what set me on the road toward libertarianism was a UC Berkeley course I took after graduating. That story will be the subject of tomorrow’s post.
