 Five years ago, I became an anarchist, and I've never looked back. My political philosophy now runs through my veins. But this wasn't always the case. I used to be a young, apathetic conservative. Then I was introduced to libertarianism, which slowly turned me into an anarchist. This might sound crazy, but I assure you it is quite reasonable and many people share my same story. It all started in 2007. I was casually aware of politics at the time. My parents were conservative, so I was conservative. YouTube was still relatively new at the time, and I remember one day stumbling across a video of Ron Paul. I was immediately intrigued. Here was this funny old man saying the opposite of all his fellow Republicans on stage, and he called himself a constitutional conservative. This sounded appealing. He would say all these fascinating things I'd never heard before, and the more videos I'd watch, the more excited I became. After only a few weeks, I was fully on board with the platform of this Ron Paul guy. Little did I know, this resonance with the political philosophy would literally change my life. If you know anything about Ron Paul, you know he's an exception to the rule. He was a politician, yes, but only in title. Politicians are rightly known as slimy, spineless, unprincipled folks whose political ambition overrules any shred of integrity that they possess. Ron Paul is the exact opposite. He defies the oxymoron of a principled politician. He's been called the one exception to the gang of 535, and it shows when he talks. He doesn't appeal to rhetorical flourishes or woo the crowd with empty platitudes. He really believes what he says and he speaks out of conviction, something which is virtually non-existent among politicians. But to me, ultimately, Ron Paul is a charming and principled nerd. He's extremely well educated in every area of political thought, especially economics. He puts philosophic ideas above politics or elections. In fact, he used his presidential campaigns as educational platforms. Ron didn't actually think he could win, but he knew more people would discover the power of free-market ideas if he ran for president. But as he would tell you, Ron Paul's ideas are more important than his person. Millions of people were swayed by the philosophy of freedom, not just his charming personality. The core principles of limited government resonated through all political upbringings, whether you identified as a liberal, conservative, or apathetic. Given my conservative ideology, I knew that lots of people gave lip service to the Constitution, but rarely did they defend it consistently. They supported military intervention overseas, but bulked at the idea of requiring Congress to formally declare war. They complained about the Department of Education, but would only support very gentle budget cuts at most. Ron said what conservatives were too afraid to say, get the government out of education altogether. We don't need a 10% budget reduction, and we need to abolish the whole thing department. Conservatives say they support individual responsibility, and they don't want a nanny state. Well, then how can they support the war on drugs? If an adult decides to peacefully smoke pot in his basement and not hurt anybody, we don't need a nanny state to micromanage his life in Thurmond Jail. Conservatives supposedly want you to be free to make bad decisions as long as you pay the consequences for them. But probably the most controversial position Ron held was on the US military. He thought, as old school conservatives did, that we should be extremely cautious before intervening in foreign affairs. He also thought the Pentagon wasn't infallible. They too are prone to the same egregious waste and mismanagement as the Department of Education. Now this ruffled a lot of feathers, but it shouldn't have. Ron simply applied the same principles across the whole spectrum of government. He was consistent, and he kept coming back to the following question. What is the proper role of government? Before we argue about cutting 10% of the Department of Education's budget, shouldn't we discuss whether or not it should exist in the first place? Is it appropriate, or even constitutional, for the executive branch to send troops into foreign countries for an extended amount of time without congressional declaration? Before we nibble around the edges of government spending, we need to talk about what the government should do in the first place. To me, he was precisely correct, but it revealed an unsavory truth. Republicans and Democrats aren't actually so different from each other. One party might want to raise spending 5%, the other might want to cut spending 5%, but both favor the status quo, and they support big government in their own respective areas. Liberals and conservatives are like two sides of the same coin. Ron's constitutional conservatism, I thought, represented a real alternative. But my journey didn't stop there, because Ron implanted a little seed in my head. When he spoke, he often mentioned the Austrian School of Economics. I had never heard of it, but eventually I got up the curiosity and decided to Google around. What I discovered changed my life. I came across the Mises Institute, which had a number of free books and lectures online about Austrian economics, and I was immediately enamored. The explanatory power of economics was breathtaking. After diving into the literature, I didn't simply believe government was inefficient. I understood why. This had an enormous impact on my political philosophy, and it started my transition to radical libertarianism. I now believe it's literally impossible to have a clear understanding about how the world works without an understanding of economics. The coordination of prices, profits, and losses in a market is awe-inspiring. No exaggeration, it's almost miraculous. Economic truths became a pillar around which I would develop my other political beliefs. The further I learned, the further I went down the rabbit hole of Austrian economics, the more radical I became. Not only was government inefficient at delivering the mail, but they were inefficient everywhere they intervened. The same economic principles apply to the post office as apply to the patent office. Of course, this wasn't radicalism for the sake of radicalism, it was just consistency. And if you apply economic principles consistently across the board, you're left with a very grim perspective of government. However, I was no anarchist. I firmly believed in small government libertarianism. Markets could handle everything except for a few core services, the courts, the military, and the police. Of course, achieving this would be considered wildly limited government compared to today's standards. My first interaction with an anarchist, ironically enough, was as an intern in Ron Paul's congressional office. I was given the opportunity to be his intern in DC for a semester, and one of his staffers considered himself an anarchist. He was a nice guy, but I didn't take his ideas too seriously. All of that changed in the summer of 2010. I was fortunate enough to attend a conference for students at the Mises Institute, the organization I held in such high regard. The conference was called Mises University, and it would be one week long focusing solely on Austrian economics. I was elated to attend, and it turned out to be one of the most intellectually stimulating weeks of my entire life. I was surrounded with the smartest peers I have ever met. A few of the lectures hinted at the possibility of complete statelessness, the idea that private entrepreneurs could better provide all of the services of government, including the courts, the military, and the police. Supposedly, for the same reasons we don't want the government to monopolize the production of shoes, we don't want them to monopolize the court system, or the production of national defense. But I wasn't convinced. By the middle of the week I was forced to adjust my beliefs a little bit, so I made up a term and called myself a secessionist for a few days. But I was no anarchist. I agreed with some core ideas that taxation is fundamentally coercive and is therefore theft, and I agreed that markets were based on voluntary, peaceful human interaction, while governments were necessarily based on violence or threats of violence. And I agreed that in a perfect world we might not need any coercion whatsoever, that voluntary decisions could reign supreme. But I thought we don't live in a perfect world, and surely in some circumstances large groups of people wouldn't care about the rights of an individual. Statelessness might sound nice in theory, but in practice people wouldn't respect property rights of a lone anarchist who declares his own independence in the middle of a city, for example, until one night. When I was challenged by a fellow student named Dan. Dan was a pretty burly guy, former Air Force I think, and we were hanging out at one of the local bars after the lectures. Of course, hanging out at the bar at Mises University really meant talking loudly about nerdy ideas in public places. I remember some locals dancing at the bar, but they were outnumbered three to one by sweaty geeks who were talking about monetary history. I told Dan about my hesitations with anarchism and he said he understood. But he said, let me ask you this. If I want to opt out of government services, should I be able to? It's a very simple question, but I didn't quite know how to respond. I mean, I wanted to say, of course you should be able to opt out of government services. If you don't want to pay, you don't have to, but then you don't get to use the services. But alas, such an admission would be tantamount to anarchism. After all, government services are by definition tied to taxation, and you can't opt out of taxation. Doing so would be opting out of government, which is precisely what these anarchists were talking about. On the other hand, I couldn't say with a straight face that, indeed, Dan should never be able to opt out of government services. I'd have to be willing to put him in jail if he tried. Even if his decision to opt out was poor, if he'd be better off by using the services but he made a bad decision, I couldn't justify forcing him to pay for something he didn't want. So I was perplexed. I didn't have a good response. And I remember slowly responding, I think I might be an anarchist now. So I wrestled with that question for the next few months, and I kept trying to justify the existence of involuntary government. And then I read a book called Chaos Theory by Bob Murphy, which has an excellent section on the private production of law. My list of necessary government services dwindled. And then it happened. I became a closet anarchist. After playing devil's advocate so much with myself, I became convinced of my counterarguments. I couldn't find a proper response to my critiques of limited government. I was shocked. I couldn't believe I had ended up so far away from where I'd started. I thought originally that anarchists were bomb-throwing hooligans who smashed windows for recreation. But this type of anarchism was about private property and peaceful, voluntary cooperation. I saw the contradictions and inconsistencies in popular conservatism, and I just couldn't stomach it any longer. By the end of 2010, I came out of the closet, but I didn't know what to call myself. Anarchists seem too dramatic and hot-button. Believe it or not, people dismiss you rather quickly upon identifying as an anarchist. I toyed around with labels like anti-statist or some other nonsense. But I've recently settled on the term I find most appropriate, market anarchism. You can sum up market anarchism succinctly. All of the services, which are currently provided by governments, can be more efficiently and ethically provided by private entrepreneurs. Granted, there's a million different ways to phrase this, but that's how I prefer. It's really not so radical, is it? Five years later, and my conviction has become stronger. The explanatory power of market anarchism is unparalleled. Politics finally makes sense when you throw out the romance surrounding government and patriotism. What's surprising to me is how my own justification for anarchism has changed. I still wholly subscribe to the Austrian economic theories, but now I'm even more compelled by the ethical and philosophic arguments for anarchism. To an anarchist, it's clear as day. Taxation is theft. Theft is immoral. Therefore, taxation is immoral. Which condemns government as immoral. It's simple and it's profound. After taking the leap to anarchism, it's preposterous and naive to try to manage the lives of 100 million people from a central planning board. Social problems that involve 300 million people aren't resolvable by one tiny little group that forces everybody to act a certain way and threatens them with jail time if they don't comply. It seems pretty clear. On a philosophic level, proponents for government run into trouble. What exactly is a government anyway? Upon inspection, governments are only grandiose and harmful abstractions. They have no tangible reality. We live in a world inhabited by individual humans. Not governments or countries. Now, I realize this might sound absurd and crazy, and I won't defend the claims right now, but I intend to give rigorous explanations for all of these ideas in the future. The anarchist worldview is radically individualist. Not because it views people as isolated decision makers that never interact with each other, but because individualism is the most philosophically critical way of viewing the world. It helps us avoid dramatic abstractions, and it opens up the world of economic thinking. And at this point, I just can't imagine turning back. Anarchism has gone to my very core. If anybody is intrigued by this story, I only ask that you pursue the topic sincerely. Hold on to your objections as long as you can, and see if your beliefs can withstand the criticism of market anarchist arguments. I humbly suggest starting with Austrian economics and see where it leads. I, for one, sought political truths as a young conservative, and I believe I've found them in market anarchism.