I was libertarian in philosophy since I was 10 or so, maybe I was just born that way. I remember seeing a political debate when I was around 14 and the female libertarian candidate was the only one making any sense. She made the other two guys look like assholes reading from some sort of after-school special script.

I hadn't identified myself as libertarian though until I started voting about ten years ago. I am 34 now. I didn't just vote libertarian, but the majority of my voting has been for Libertarian candidates, republicans who are close to libertarian, or libertarian candidates masquerading as one of the one parties[sic.]

I still believe in social liberty, and that has never changed and probably never will. I don't believe laws and policies supporting the idea that 'a few bad apples spoil the batch' are fair or right. My prime example: weapons laws. I think that if a device allowed an individual to make a single decision that could hurt or kill multiple people easily it should be carefully monitored by government, society, community, etc. For clarification, I think only missiles, bombs, and other types of things like that should be monitored, not banned, but monitored and assessed for risk.

I think I can sum up my beliefs on social policy with: guns and drugs should be deregulated. A few of my friends and I keep joking about forming the Guns and Drugs party.

I still believe the principles of economic libertarianism are right. BUT!!! I believe they will not work. Nowadays, it seems as if the majority of libertarianism is focused on economic libertarianism. Poor people blaming other poor people for why they are poor. Middle class people blaming everyone but the wealthy for why they have no socio-economic mobility, or more simply, why they cannot afford a jet-ski. And well, the rich remain anonymous or silent unless a television camera is pointed at them and most of them will never let that happen.

So now I am an anarcho-communist, a social libertarian, there are other words for what I believe but I don't give a shit about defining myself so that other people can more easily make judgement calls about me without getting to know me, I think that's called prejudice and western culture is rife with it.

I was homeless for roughly a decade. I was kicked out of my family when I was young because my grades were bad and I smoked marijuana (I didn't at the time, but no one believed me. Thanks Nancy Reagan, Drug War, et al.) I suck at giving a shit about money. I don't know if I am mentally ill somehow or if the world is crazy, but the things money buys and having money has never appealed to me enough for me to be able to hold down a steady job. I felt much more alive sleeping outside and making the stuff I needed out of found junk than I ever did trying to maintain a job, pay for an apartment, and the whole depressing deal. But I kept trying. In the span of my 12ish years of trying to "play the game" "fit in" "be a responsible adult" "be a productive member of society" etc. ad nauseum, I just couldn't maintain my sanity long enough to keep a job for more than 3 months. I had 36 jobs in those 12ish years and the longest I could do was 3 months. Even though everyone treated me like a lazy leech, I wasn't. I just didn't have access to the resources and opportunities that could utilize my talents best. I'm a stay-at-home-dad now. I will fix anything but cars for anyone I know, build a PC (I know it's easy, but a lot of people are intimidated by the process,) I literally do so many things well and for free that I would be wasting almost a minute of your time typing them all up. The point is, I spend every day caring for my child, sometimes other children, fixing everyone's stuff just so they won't throw it out, cooking all of my family's food, cleaning our house, modding a handful of subreddits, making every consumable good our house uses from scratch, the list goes on. I am always busy doing something for someone and I occasionally take breaks for some fun. I was never lazy. Society just requires too much out of people for them to be productive. If I can do it off the books and without jumping through the multitude of hoops, fine.

Anyway, getting away from the personal validation and back to the topic of economic egalitarianism. I had a thought one day. I've had a hard time selling this idea even to my friends who proclaim they are socialists and communists. Property rights: at one point in time there was one organism on the planet that was a human. There had to be a point at which the genetic variation that produced what we call homo sapiens was embodied in one organism. If property rights are for humans only, then that one human could have claimed to own the entire world, for it would take other humans to dispute their claim. That was probably the last time anyone had fair access to the resources of our planet. Property rights to me seem like when my toddler tries to convince me that because something is in her hand it is hers to do with as she pleases. I have it, it's mine. So my thoughts on the matter of property rights are summed up with, of the world's resources, I should have access to (I can utilize it or not) an equal fraction of it's resources. I mean let's just base this topic on land alone. At one point everyone used the land that they wanted. How did we get to the point where people have to work for land that at some point in history someone just took. I don't care where you live, there are people suffering for lack of access to land and there are people who have land they will never ever use for anything. [The first article that popped up in my google search](http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/more_vacant_homes_than_homeless_in_us_20111231/) There are many more vacant houses than homeless people in the US. The greatest, richest, most wonderful, and perfect, god bless it, America. It's the land of the "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" and the home of the whopper. I am disgusted by the disparity of wealth in the country I live in (I wanted to say "in my country" but it isn't mine at all.)

Intellectual property: on this subject first and foremost is that I have some product designs for goods that everyone uses everyday and my design would revolutionize the market entirely and would benefit all of mankind. I want to distribute my products in a way that they are produced as cheaply as possible and sold for the bare cost of production and distribution with any profit made by donation only. I would like to distribute these products with instructions on how to produce them. I think designs are so good that they would sell themselves. I just want to be able to protect my designs from being utilized by profit machines. I can't. Even if I had US patents (I can't afford a patent lawyer and I WOULD NEED ONE) there would be no way to keep foreign companies or domestic corporations from finding a way to take my idea from me and monetize it. I don't believe in intellectual property, I think the idea is silly and my toddler would think so too. I only want property right s over my ideas because I want them to be distributed freely and improved freely but not for monetary gain. So here I sit, a broke person with some amazing ideas that I worked very hard on developing and I just have to wait until some corporation figures out the same thing so I can buy it at the store cheaper than I can produce it on a small scale.

My last paragraph was too much of a diatribe and got away from my ultimate point of why intellectual property is harmful and wrong. Getting back to the subject, I will share my thoughts on (spooky music) piracy. I pirate. I pirate books, music, movies, and games. If I couldn't pirate them I wouldn't buy them. I remember the 90s when a CD was 20-some dollars a pop. 20 dollars was a lot back then. To me, it is still a lot of money for anything. Back then I shoplifted a few CDs and the rest of the CDs I owned were gifts or copies someone made on their computer. I had roughly 20 CDs in my tiny CD case. I loved music so much that I would have had millions of albums in my collection but it wasn't possible for me. I was a musician too and I liked 99% of all music I had heard. I feel like if any of the musicians that I shoplifted their CDs would have known, that some broke, homeless party kid was going to commit a crime to hear their music, they would have just given it to me. It wasn't their call though because most of them sold their performance to some profiteering label.

I am rambling and my digressions are getting further and further off-topic. I will just make a statement about IP. I don't believe it is acceptable. If you have a good idea and cannot share it with your fellow humans for free, then keep it to yourself and die with it. Your mother didn't let you leech life out of her tits and then later charge you a fee for the milk you drank. Besides, profit-driven-model innovation has been proven obsolete. [my first search result, I wish I could quickly find a link to the original study I had read on this subject](http://wraltechwire.com/business/tech_wire/news/blogpost/9418975/) But regardless, I think the fact that there are many countries in the world where doctors are paid as much as american cab drivers and the health care is stellar there proves my point. My point being, that love, participation, and praise are more likely to drive innovation than profit. I pity stereotypical libertarians for believing that only money motivates. Fuck! I even subscribe to {Game Theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory) and I won't even entertain that notion any more.

Okay! Now I make my claim for how policy should be created. We've all heard a phrase like, "Do as you will, but cause no harm." lol I think that is in the satanic bible (nevermind, I am paraphrasing an Aleister Crowley quote, but yeah.) LMAO. Anyway, regardless of it's sophomoric orgins, I believe this: Leadership, however it is implemented, should minimize harm. Fiscal libertarianism, while I believe it is logically right, hurts others. Not everyone is driven by personal gain and these are the members of society who should have just as much, if not the most, access to protection, utilization, and opportunity than others.

I am individualist, who has realized that the individual has the most to gain in a collectivist environment.

Okay. I'm going to 'fess up now. I am drunk. I wasn't when I started typing this up, but I need to stop typing, regardless of my compulsion to share everything that I believe with my first post to this little, but awesome, sub. I wanted to talk more about how Ayn Rand was the best thing that ever happened to me because unlearning her seductive ideas was more enlightening to me than anything else and a giant dung heap of other stuff. Actually when I type an obligatory TL;DR here real soon I will mention that fact. It was Ayn Rand who seduced me into libertarianism and turned me off to it. Here we go!

**TL;DR:** Ayn Rand's books seduced me into libertarianism AND disillusioned me to libertarianism.