Change of tune

Hi all, thought I'd share something and see if anyone else has had anything like the same experience.

I used to class myself as an 'anarchist'. I believed in direction action, that government was essentialy a bad thing and that people should be allowed more or less to govern themselves.

About a year back I changed my mind. After being involved a great deal in grassroots movements, I began to be disillusioned. Everyone around me seemed to be into the whole sloganeering thing, and doing things that they thought were making a difference but in reality weren't achieving very much at all. On top of that, most of the people around me seemed to be very much into it for how they thought it made them look.

I got out of it, read a lot of political theory, did a lot of thinking and reassessing of the world and my own ideals. I'm now more or less at the opposite end of the spectrum - I believe in small, democraticaly elected government by the people for the people: essentially, republicanism a la Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson. I think that a lot of smaller 'anarchist' movements do a lot of damage to themselves through some of the stuff described above, while being at the same time difficult for a large portion of the public to relate to (even though I still agree with some of their principles) and unable to take into account or consider opposite views - basically, close minded.

Anyone else had any experiences like this, entire turn-arounds of their own viewpoints? How and why, and what do you believe now?

>>20

Well, how else are we going to rein in our rediculous regulatory and welfare regimes?  No one who can get annointed by our oligarchs will be able to touch the EPA or welfare state, to name but two.  So either we do nothing and let our country turn into Zimbabwe or we take over put someone in charge with good ideas, and watch as the collapse of the regulatory and welfare regimes means more growth and prosperity for actual productive Americans rather than people who have gotten good at playing the game of kissing up to the bearucrats who actually run our system.  If you have the right checklist and follow it, you don't even have to have a job.  You get money for doing all kinds of non-productive things and outright punished for doing productive things.

For example, if you never save any money, you can get a free ride to college, however, taking a job means that rather than free college as the nonproductive get, you get to pay for it.  If you never save money for a time when your industry might decline, and never get any job skills, the government will let you live on welfare for as long as you want.  You'll get food stamps, and you can eat lobster and organic vegetables while the people working at the stores that sell such "staples" generally live on cheaper canned veggies and ramen noodles.  At every turn in this welfareocracy you get PUNISHED for producing, innovating, and generally not being brain dead. 

So unless you have an actual solution to stopping the persecution of productive people, I think Ron Paul is about the only option we have left.