My own journey through politics has been somewhat strange. My first political memories, apart from such world events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, were of the presidential election of 1992, during which I gained an immediate and enduring dislike for Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party in general. I was all of thirteen years old and emerging into a state of embryonic political awareness. I was also living with my grandmother, who along with one of her sisters whom I visited frequently, was about as rabid a Clinton supporter as could be found. These two elderly Lebanese ladies basically though that Slick Willy was the greatest thing to hit the American political landscape since FDR.

But I was not immediately drawn to the Republican side of the street. In fact, shamed to say it though I will always be, the following year saw me go through my first political change, one I will forever regret. In eighth grade I was a socialist. Yes, that's right, a socialist, about as far away from my current political leanings as is possible. And how did I arrive at this particular bend in the road? I was fascinated by the newly collapsed Soviet Union, had the wealth of a middle school library's encyclopedias at my hands, and was friends with two very socialist students who were not only smarter and craftier than me, but willing to proselytize. But I really can't blame myself. I was impressionable, and ignorant of the realities of politics, so I came under their sway. For all of six months I called myself a socialist, and read all I could about the American Socialist Party, before forever abandoning it all as being just plain wrong.

And what saved me from my red abyss? Rush Limbaugh. I began listening to Rush during the summer after eighth grade, which was 1994. So come this summer, I'll have been a loyal Rush fan for a decade. My grandma was horrified, she loathed Rush as something close to the Devil Incarnate, she thought Al Franken was the Second Coming. But I began to listen. And I loved what I heard. Then I bought The Way Things Ought To Be, and loved what I read. I think I've always been a conservative, but through listening and reading I grew into the identity. Rush kept me sane through all the long, terrible Clinton years, through the dissillusionment after the Republican victory in 1994 and the "Contract With America" failed to enact any real, lasting changes, all through that decade whose culture I utterly loathe, the 1990s.

Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, in 1997, I gleefully resgistered to vote, and was registered as a Republican. I avidly described myself as an avowed Conservative Republican from then until about the beginning of 2003, when my mounting dissatisfaction with the GOP made my loyalty begin to wane. The Republican Party, now running both houses of Congress and the Presidency, though still claiming to be in support of small government and a traditional constitutional role for government, had become little different from its supposed opposite party, the Democrats. The Republicans, though paying various lip-service to the contrary, have abandoned the notion that government does not exist to take care of everyone and solve all the problems of the world. And while on many moral issues I am still Republican in spirit, social morality alone is no reason to stay with a political party. The GOP as now in power has taxed too much, spent too much, singularly failed to reduce the size and scope of government, and joined their Democrat counterparts far too often in trying to excessively legislate morality.

So what have I done? The prospect of finding another party was not, at first, very appealing at all. I'd been raised to regard third parties as somewhat silly and useless, and after the Reform Party's antics in recent years, I was inclined to agree. I briefly flirted with the idea of being a registered Independant, as my sister has done. But that isn't for me, either. I see political parties as being a good thing, in general, and possessing the necessary organization and funding to enact real change. Then, I began to investigate the Libertarian Party. I was admittedly skeptical, not really believing I would find anything worthwhile. But I did. And after extensive investigation, I decided to change my formal political affiliation to Libertarian.

Why Libertarianism? Man was created a reasonable and intelligent being, with free will. He was endowed with these gifts by his Creator, and they are inseparable from him. As mankind began to grow and advance, coming out of his unenlightened Stone Age past, he began to form systems of order to guide him. This also is a godly thing, for God has no use for chaos. But order is not everything. Respect for the individual, and for individual responsibility, is absolutely essential for a righteous, just government. And our Founding Fathers knew this, when they prepared a government unlike any which had gone before. There is a proper role for government in the world, but it is not absolute.

Chaos is ungodly, it is a total lack of order. But totalitarianism in any form is no less so, for it seeks to deny human beings their inherent, God-given individuality. Enforcement of Natural Law is the purpose of government, and its sole purpose. It exists to see that human beings do not kill, maim, rape, defraud, or steal from one another. (As such it also entreats with others of like kind.) This extends to creating and maintaining such things as systems of civil and criminal justice, enacting a rational regulation of commerce, and helping to settle disputes between citizens, organizations, and lower governments. But in America we are moving beyond this pure, logical purpose, towards possessing a government that seeks to provide our every material need and comfort, to legislate and enforce morality beyond the purvue of Natural Law; a government that, in essence, seeks not to be empowered by the citizenry, but to have power over them.

In general, this is my view as a constitutional Conservative: I support the limited, strictly enumerated powers of government as were known in the time of the Founding Fathers; I reject the expansion of government regardless of positive motives, good intentions, or social expediency; I believe that the liberty and responsibility of free individuals is paramount over all other considerations, and that government is merely the arbiter of Natural Law among such free individuals. For me, this is today most effectively expressed in the platform of the Libertarian Party.

For the past seventy years, the United States government has been continuously growing, sapping away ever more of her citizens' income in the form of taxes (something which itself was not constitutional until the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, a full 124 years after the Constitution went into effect; the actual constitutionality of this amendment is still questionable) to fund welfare and other programs that likewise are ever-expanding. But it hasn't worked. I will now elaborate:

  • Despite the much-touted War on Poverty that began in the 1960s, poverty has not been eliminated at all; there are more impoverished Americans today than when the War on Poverty was originally started, and instead of empowering poor citizens to greater achievment and seizure of opportunity, it has created a culture of dependancy upon government handouts.
  • The federal government has been throwing increasingly huge amounts of money into the public education system since the 1960s. In spite of this, educational standards across the board have actually declined, to the point where a large fraction of the student body nationwide exits the system without ever having learned to effectively read, write, or perform rudimentary arithmetic, not to mention having any appreciation or understanding of the Western culture and values upon which this nation was founded.
  • The federal government has waged a multi-billion-dollar war on illicit drug use since the 1960s, which has been such a complete and utter failure that there are more users and dealers of illicit drugs now than ever before, and it has become an underground economy unto itself, breeding every kind of violent crime in its wake. The government's previous failed experiment with prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s likewise created an underground empire that allowed organized crime to flourish.
  • The federal government has taken upon itself an increasingly burdensome responsibility for environmental protection, in spite of which the state of the environment has not markedly improved, and the previously sacrosanct property rights of individuals have been singularly eroded. And much of the government's environmental policy has been based on what are, at best, specious scientific theories and questionable motives.
  • There have been multiple instances of the government attempting to impose excessive federal regulations upon various industries, costing billions of taxpayer dollars and slowing economic growth. In some cases, such as the air travel industry and (to a certain extent) broadcasting, deregulation has occurred, in each instance causing the industry concerned to experience greatly enhanced growth (boom and bust cycles notwithstanding).
  • The United States has poured untold billions of dollars into the machinery of the United Nations, and in return has witnessed a steady stream of actions and decisions by that body that have run in direct contravention to American interests both at home and abroad. Moreover, the United States and her allies are continually outmaneuvered and thwarted within the UN's voting apparatus by gangs of nations which are undemocratic at best and at worst open sponsors of terrorism and religious oppression, usually with the connivance of other major powers who support them as client states.
This is just a partial list of the American government's wastefulness and expansionistic scope, preying on the lives and livlihoods of individual citizens to fund programs and activities which, in the end, have proven to the detriment of that same citizenry. This is not the way a logical, rational government looking to the interests of its citizens behaves.