Here is a repost from last year.
How I went from an Active to Passive Libertarian
When I first began accepting libertarian ideas, I was very excited. It provided this competent framework for looking at the world. It was always one step ahead of the other political parties, which my entire life I considered completely unpersuasive and typically juvenile. It twisted conventional wisdom in knots by looking at the whole picture, the costs and the benefits, and the counterfactuals which other people treated as 0s. The rights based arguments were lacking; they started with counter-intuitive rules out of nowhere, called them rights, and then applied them to get libertarianism. That’s no way to do philosophy. But the utilitarian arguments made a lot of sense. Why is government getting in the way of people conducting mutually beneficial trade? Sure people make mistakes, but isn’t government made up of people?
Naturally, I wanted to tell everyone. Surely they must not have heard these ideas, or they would be the ones telling me! I wanted to make sure I was on solid ground, so I sounded arguments where libertarians and mainstream economics overlap; free trade, minimum wage causes unemployment, economic growth improves working standards (not so much unions or legislation), drug companies kill people by restricting drugs that save lives. I didn’t change any minds. And I didn’t understand why arguments that I found so persuasive they didn’t find persuasive at all.
In hindsight I realize that there are good economic reasons to reject that these beliefs lead to libertarian conclusions. But nobody I talked to was familiar enough with economics to make them. The counter-arguments consisted of drawing upon impressions we’ve all had since we were six years old and expressing them. China is destroying American workers with cheap goods. Big business would pay cents on the dollar without minimum wage. Drug companies would carelessly kill their consumers for profit if we let them. Workers would fall into meat grinders and managers would shrug and say, “get back to work boys!”
Every problem society ever has can be solved with new laws. And the fact that we have laws against problems that don’t exist proves the case. This is the logic that was applied to pretty much every single social issue.
I’ve become more familiar with economics and more familiar with libertarianism since then. The more I learn, the more I find a mishmash of parts I think are correct and incorrect. Over time I’ve realized that the problem is not education, its dogma. Most libertarians aren’t any different. I give a clear cut case for market failure and it never sinks in. There’s always another objection, no matter how inane. It’s no different from talking to conservatives about trade with poor Chinese workers, or liberals about trade with poor African workers. Economists have been past this cynicism toward international trade for 200 years. But these lessons never sink into social consciousness.
Part of my own experiences may have been my own fault. Maybe I didn’t do a good job giving the economic textbook case. Maybe I shouldn’t have joked around about my worshipping of Ron Paul. It was my light-hearted way of drawing attention to the libertarian candidate. But people took it as me drinking the cool-aid.
So my libertarian themed Facebook posts tapered away. I’m not in the business of changing minds. I allow others to vent their political grief toward me without challenging them. I divorced society. We’re just not meant for each other. I continue to satisfy my intellectual curiosity without feeling the need to share with others. It’s just a better way to live life. If I come by someone who is earnestly seeking, I’ll try to help out. If I come by someone who knows more than I do, I try to learn from them. I’ve found this whole process internally satisfying. But as soon as it becomes external, it is exasperating and I’m skeptical that it does any good.
I would encourage others to take the same approach whether they’re libertarian or not. These other people around you, they are not trying to know the truth. They’re going to believe what they like no matter what you say.
To a large extent, I feel the same way. But I think that back then I gave too much credit to the idea that people just made up their ideologies. Instead ideologies are formed in order to associate with particular feelings. The real way to persuade people to join an ideology is not to expound on its truth, but to just be the kind of people other people want to be associated with.
