Answering the tag

Sunni has tagged me to answer a freedom-oriented meme: “What motivated you to start looking into Anarchistic/Libertarian thought?”  My short answer echoes a book written by Jerome Tuccille, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand.

A slightly longer answer:
‘Twas the bicentennial.  I had briefly dropped out of college when my parents reneged on their promise to pay for my first year of college and I had to work to pay off that bill before the college would let me continue. A co-workers at one of my jobs told me he thought I ought to read The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. I read not only that title, but also Atlas Shrugged, Anthem and all of her non-fiction.

By that time I read all those books, I’d managed to pay for my first year of college and was back in school and I found myself in the University Library, looking in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature for mentions of Rand and Objectivism. One of the articles I found mentioned libertarianism and the Libertarian Party and that the LP headquarters was in the same city as my school. The next thing you know, I found myself at their doorstep. If any of you have read L. Neil Smith’s description of the Propertarian Party headquarters in his novel, The Probability Broach, then you have a pretty accurate picture of what I found. And like Win Bear, I walked away with a copy of Murray Rothbard’s, For A New Liberty, (in Smith’s book the author was Mary Ross Bird) which led me from Rand’s limited government model to full blown anarchism.