What made you a Libertarian

[Baia]

I am curious about our resident Libertarians.

What are your stories?  

Have you lived in other countries or traveled away from where you grew up?

Have you lived in big cities in this country or do you feel more comfortable in small, rural or wilderness communities?

What life experiences have brought you to your philosophy?

And yes, have you been oppressed?  How?

I am reading an ebook by a man who grew up urban poor in Massachusetts.  His story is not too out of the ordinary in my observation but it is interesting to hear about his experiences growing up as a disadvantaged white boy.  His story could have easily been mine if I had been born a boy. 

I really want to know from real persons telling their own stories and not just talking points.

[A4L]

"Maybe we could have a discussion about what is going into creating this polarity.  Who is benefiting from it?  I have my ideas about it."- Baia

I have ideas about it as well.

My logic is about using common sense and trying to be honest about things and true to myself.

I know for a fact, and I think that you would agree (because it is obvious) that there is so much information out there that is either not exactly true, or excessively false.

So much is contradictory.

If you listen to much of what the left says, it generally concludes with nearly 100% of what the right says and believes in and even how history is remembered as being wrong and/or bad.

And conversely on the right it is very close to an opposite view and understanding as to analyzing the left.

What has to be a fact, is that both opposite views cannot be 100% correct.

It is surely possible that one side alines with more reality on specific events and at times the other.  Life is just not generally arranged so that one person or group is always pure and righteous and the other with only all evil motives all of the time.

One thing that makes a whole lot of sense to me is that whether left or right, there are people that make huge profits and/or enhance their power through the art of strategically moving and acting during the upheavals reported by the news that keep much of the electorate at odds, in conflict, and more importantly distracted and decidedly diluted while we battle against each other and stay separated through our identifying with the labels that we side with.

As long as the people stay divided and filled with conflicting "truths" we are little threat to either the bad actors in government or the crony's in the private sector that lobby and collude with them.

So what goes through my mind is the hope to remind people to keep in mind what we share in common with others and not only focus on what we have differences over, with the goal to keep open dialogs.

I know I do not know everything, and I am guessing that many others are somewhat in the same boat. So if we can hear and see more than just our one perspective, it shouldn't hurt us. What is true will still remain true even if we get a perspective that is poorly founded.

I am very much in love with the little I understand about our Constitution and Declaration of Independence and the thinking and lives of our founders.

The idea of Freedom of speech to me is so important! In countries where one must fear to speak the truth because the government may destroy such a one who does, should never be the case here if the Constitution be upheld.

[funesthememorious]

There are only two possible end results from a libertarian type society/government : a right-wing military dictatorship/police state invested in stamping out all leftist thinking, then appropriating the country's wealth for themselves - see Chile under Pinochet and the present United States or having central authority break down completely as power localizes into the hands of local criminals and feudal/tribal warlords with little compunction about abusing and terrorizing the local population - see Somalia.

In college I was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society ( SDS ), a libertarian organization, a lot of our ideals were similar to the Black Panthers. Once you gain a bit of maturity and real world experience you do come to realize it is an empty racist ideology that often is accompanied by theocratic overtones ( see Michelle Bachmann )  

[A4L]

Not sure that  I understand your response funesthememorious.

First off a "military dictatorship/police state" is incongruous with an ideology that seeks to have government stay out of our business. 

The latter example of little to no laws whatsoever is a fair consideration, but there is a difference I think between libertarian ideals and just having no government or laws whatsoever. I am not familiar with Chile under Pinochet and I know nothing of Bachmann other than Alinsky like attacks on her that prove her actions to be anything substantially significant.