An Introduction

The Blogger:

My name is Lee LeTourneau and I'm a 25 year old IT guy who lives just outside of Richmond, VA.  I married the love of my life in May and have 2 children, age 7 and 8.  I play bass guitar when I can and love cars.  I've always found politics and economics interesting, though when I was younger I had a tiny understanding of them in comparison to today.

I'm not a writer, and I find it difficult to convey my thoughts through words, but there is so much going on in my brain lately that I decided I needed to at least try to put some of it in words.  The main focus of this blog will be my views on life, government, society, etc... as I've grown more and more libertarian over the past few years of my life.  I keep up with the events of our country to the best of my ability and find that I have a completely different opinion of things than the mainstream media, which I'm sure most libertarians understand.

I wasn't always a libertarian; in fact, I considered myself a Republican from the time I was middle school until fairly recently.  As a teenager I frequently found myself siding with the Republicans and showing my support for ideals that I now find pretty ridiculous.  I remember when the Patriot Act was signed into law in fall of 2001; I had just turned 14 and was hearing a lot of complaints from people who claimed it would "steal our freedoms."  At the time, my answer was "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you don't have anything to be afraid of."  Thinking about that now, I can't believe that I would ever have a thought like that, but I was just a dumb kid who knew nothing about real life.

My understanding of the constitution when I was younger was that it was there to separate the three branches of government and outline how laws would be made.  I wasn't incorrect, but I never considered the importance of the limitations that it (tried to) put on the federal government.  After I graduated high school, I started attending ECPI Technical College.  At my home we only had dial-up internet due to it being far out in the "boondocks," but at school I had unlimited access to high speed internet and would frequently read the news and just explore wikipedia during class breaks or once I was done with my course work.  I recall one day coming across the wikipedia page for "libertarianism," a term that I had heard a few times in high school. Since we never really discussed the details of it in school (go figure), I figured it was some dead ideology from the 1700s that a few nutjobs probably still followed.  As I read the page, I was surprised to find that a lot of it made perfect sense to me.

At that point, I had a lot going on with my life...school, work, hanging out with friends, and playing music, so the idea of libertarianism didn't sink too deep into my mind.  The next time I really began to consider it again was in 2008 as the Presidential Election grew near.  Strangely, I heard about Ron Paul but kind of blew him off at first due to the "third party candidates don't matter" mindset that so many still have today.  I remember reading a lot about Obama and McCain and all I could do was facepalm.  It was the real-life version of the "giant douche vs. turd sandwich" episode of South Park.  At the time,  McCain seemed rather average and I figured he would probably do less to screw up the country than Obama, who had what seemed like radical views of massive government intervention.  I had just gotten hugely into dystopian fiction and imagined a dystopian USA in 4 years with Obama as President.  Because of this, I voted for McCain...I picked the "lesser of the 2 evils," but as we know, Obama won.

After that, my frustrations began to grow, especially when I would watch the news.  Anti-Obama blabber from some places vs. deification of him from other places.  It seemed impossible to get factual information from the news, so I took to the internet.  I started to rediscover libertarianism again as I began to read about natural law and property rights, small government, self evidence, and self-ownership, but I really struggled with the libertarian view on drugs and prostitution initially.  After thinking about the legality of drug use and prostitution in relation to natural law, I started to realize that making the choice to do drugs or get a prostitute was the same as making a choice to eat unhealthy food, smoke cigarettes, drive your car off of a cliff, stop exercising, etc.  Once I made this connection, it was like an awakening in my mind as I started to consider things that I held very firm views on from a different perspective.  A lot of my personal beliefs changed and at that point, I really felt I could not relate to the Republican party any more and definitely could not relate to the Democratic party either.  At this point, I feel like I really became a libertarian as opposed to a liberty-minded Republican.

I started reading about Ron Paul again and his fight against bloated federal government, wars, and especially his anti-federal reserve stance.  This interested me because I, like many, thought "The Fed" was just another government organization that monitored economic change or something.  Once I started to read, I was shocked!  This was another huge awakening for me and I started to read a lot about the "Austrian School of Economics."  As I learned about the Austrian view vs. the Keynesian view, I realized that my view of economics, which was mostly based on common sense pretty well aligned with the Austrian view.

With the next election growing near, I find myself more and more interested in the ideas around natural law, capitalism, and self-governance and I find that a lot more people are waking up to the huge problems with our federal government in the same way that I have.

In this blog I hope share some of my understanding of libertarianism and help educate other of the possibility of restoring our country to the great nation it once was.

-Lee