Looking back on this blog 13 years later
I randomly came back to read some of my old posts here, and wanted to leave a message for anyone else who may find this. I was really confident in my positions during the period of my life when I was active here, as most libertarians are. I thought I had all the answers. I was wrong.
I don't consider myself a libertarian anymore, and I haven't for a few years now. At this point I consider myself a socialist. As a libertarian, I would have defined socialism as the idea of a centralized, government-controlled economy where wealth is forcibly redistributed to people who didn't earn it. Today, I would define it as a world in which the rights of workers matter, and where you can expect to have a real stake in the company you work for. Where the people at the top don't walk away with 99% of the value of the work everyone else is doing, and where we actually have social safety nets and take care of people who need help, instead of throwing them to the wolves.
There were a lot of things that all came together to shift my viewpoint, but the core of it is that eventually, I couldn't ignore that many of the things libertarians (including me at the time I was writing here) say would happen if only we could reduce government oversight are currently possible, and yet no one is actually doing them.
Instead of competition driving prices down, basically every industry has been consolidating into fewer and fewer huge companies who control everything and can set prices however they want. Instead of industries being sensible about how they interact with the environment, they're continuing to destroy our planet. Captains of industry may be creating jobs, but they're paying starvation wages and crushing unionizing efforts, all while buying themselves yachts that are so big they need smaller yachts to support them, and sending themselves into space to appease their own egos.
In short, the same shit they've always done since the invention of capitalism. Capitalism is, and has always been, a system intentionally designed to funnel money and wealth from the many to the few, as efficiently as possible.
On top of that, most libertarian spaces, movements, and organizations are havens for white supremacy and sexism, and openly or not, they support the concept of a white cishet patriarchy. And many of the organizations I thought highly of at this point in my life were founded, funded, or supported by billionaires like the Koch brothers, because it financially benefitted them to create a generation of people who think billionaires should be worshipped and allowed to act however they want. All while their exaltation of money over human beings led to deaths, chemical spills, the biggest wealth disparity since the French Revolution, and the looming climate disasters that my generation and the ones after us will be dealing with after those people are dead.
I'm not going to delete anything here, because I think it's important, if only for myself, to be able to look back at what I thought during this period of my life.
I, like most libertarians, lived with a lot of unexamined privilege. I was raised as a white cis hetero man, and I honestly never gave much thought to the fact that other people might have different experiences. In 2022 I know that I'm a trans lesbian, and that process too has changed my views on a lot of things. I now see my upbringing and earlier life in a very different light, and am much more conscious of the privilege I've lived with. It made it very easy to be smugly superior and think I knew everything, but I was an idiot.
So to any libertarian who happens to find any of my old posts somehow and sees anything that reinforces your own views, I hope you also see this message. I hope you can step back and think critically about your own biases. I hope you can find your way out like I did.
-Brenna