[tomdemaine]

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How have you come to acquire the opinions that you currently have?

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Long and painful analysis of my own hypocrisies.

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Share some of that analysis with us.

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Well long story short I used to be a raging socialist because I was taught that the rich are evil and we should all help the poor and I genuinely bought into it. However I didn't see the underlying violence that was ever so thinly veiled behind all the actions of government. Wealth redistribution sounds like such a good idea until you realise that it is removing property from one person under the threat of jail (or worse if you resist arrest) and giving a small fraction of that money to another based on arbitrary whim.

I always knew that the initiation of violence was evil. Not just not nice but a moral crime. Once you look behind the curtain and see the violence the "make sick kids better and free puppies for all" bill doesn't seem as good as it used to.

I was a hypocrite because I said that violence was wrong but I wanted to use violence to achieve my own subjective ends. Not only is that a moral evil but it has the secondary problem that it never actually works either.