This is a confessional. This is a real life personal story. I used to be a liberal. I used to believe that the state should tax rich people and give that money to poor people. I used to believe that the state should always be involved in all economic decisions because the state knows best. It’s all about redistribution. You take wealth where it’s being wasted and you give it to people who deserve it because they’re poor.
I used to think that there’s no such thing as a social problem that the state can’t fix. Whether it’s employment, poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, the state was the answer. In fact, if I look at my past political positions, liberal is probably putting it mildly. The better label would be communist.
I truly believe that there was a lot of waste in society and that waste was almost always perpetrated by rich people. These are people who have more money than they could count and how have no moral claim to that money. It’s unfair that life just worked out this way where 1% owned 60% of the wealth. It’s an outrage.
I truly believed in Karl Marx who said “to each according to his need and from each according to his ability.” Sounds awesome, right? Unfortunately, liberalism and, to a certain extent and its most extreme form, communism are essentially two sides of the same coin. Just like with everything else in life, there are many things that look good on paper that are flat out nightmares in reality.
If you need proof of this, just look at places like Cuba, Russia under Stalin, Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and currently Maduro. They’re shit holes. Nobody in their right mind would want to live there. Of course, a lot of these were completely hidden from me because I didn’t want to see it. I was a liberal I was a broke college student living on scholarship money and I believed that I deserved free money.
So what changed my mind? How did I go from liberal to conservative? In other words, how do I go from being clueless to being an adult? I got a job. It only took me one look at my paycheck to see what’s up. I started making really good money right after college and a huge chunk of that went to taxes. I got really excited when my boss promoted me and I started making a hundred thousand dollars a year.
You know how much my take home pay increased? It only increased by one thousand dollars per pay check. That was an outrage. I worked hard to reach that level and to earn that money and the state all too easily and all too greedily took my money. That’s how I disabused myself of being a liberal.
Liberalism is only fun when you’re on the receiving end of free cash. But believe me, if you are a proud person who like to earn your way through life and who would like to earn your keep, liberalism is an insult because it’s basically built on the assumption or the conceit that everybody else is a slave.
When you believe that the state has the moral right to take a large portion of somebody’s hard earned money, in other words, the fruit of that person’s labor, you are saying that you have a superior right to that person’s labor because that labor is require to produce that money.
You’ve essentially turned that person into a slave. You may be thinking what’s the big deal. Well, woul you like it done to you? My point exactly.
