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The bureaucracy, inefficiency, waste, national debt, loss of states’ rights, erosion of individual rights, my experience in the public schools, and the military interventionism of our government caused me to become a libertarian capitalist, until recently. In my younger, college days, I was very concerned about poverty and world hunger. My parents were quite alarmed when I told them I was a democratic socialist. I also believed that a democratic, world federal government would abolish the foolish wars that result from national rivalry. My favorite expression was from Karl Marx: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Years later, my concern about environmental degradation motivated me to attend the first national conference of the Green Movement in 1987. [1] Six people from Indiana attended, and I was one of them.
So whether it is the result of being wishy-washy or seeing the limitations of various political ideologies, I can say I have been on both sides of the fence. The mainstream Republican and Democratic federal legislators have become totally corrupted by corporate lobbyists who finance them and get them reelected. I have found that various libertarian, socialist, and anarchist websites (outside of the mainstream) provide accurate assessments of today’s political problems, though their proposed solutions are very different from one another.
Capitalists want to remove corruption in government in order to have a true, free market society. Socialists want to remove corporate corruption to have a society based on democratic socialism. Anarchists say all forms of government are corrupt and should be eliminated. Some anarchists favor a free market society without a government; others might favor decentralized, egalitarian communes.