Growing Pains
Or: A love letter to the Libertarian I used to be.
I didn’t know a damn thing about politics when I hit my rebellious phase in the late 1980s. So how was it that I set my sights on “the government” as the authority to resist? My parents weren’t hippies—born in the early ‘40s, they weren’t even Boomers. They were part of that in-between generation that valued hard work, upward mobility, and the promise of postwar prosperity. College-educated, pragmatic, politically middle-of-the-road. They raised me to believe in myself and follow my dreams. I was lucky; nothing to rebel against there.
I didn’t like doing homework, but I read obsessively. I had some great teachers, whom I drove crazy by asking too many questions in class—not because I was trying to challenge their authority, but because I couldn’t stop noticing the cracks in the story we were all being asked to believe. I had the freedom to be rebellious because the consequences were never that severe. I lived in a world where the cops waved at you and the public schools were funded, where the roads were paved and the utilities worked. I was swaddled in all the benefits of a well-ordered society, even as I started raging against it.
Rebellion: everybody’s doing it
I just couldn’t escape the sense that there was something…plastic…about the world I lived in, as seen on TV. Mainstream music in the late ’80s felt like an after-school special. Whitney Houston promising eternal love. Huey Lewis selling the power of capitalism. Even the rebellion had been co-opted and blow-dried; mass-produced.
Maybe I owe it all to Tipper Gore. The conservative morality-in-music movement she spawned gave my generation a roadmap to an anti-establishment soundtrack paved with Parental Advisory stickers. There’s nothing more compelling to a teen trying to figure out who they are than a “do not enter” sign. NWA taught me about a very different encounter with authority than the cops who took us back to our parents when we got caught smashing pumpkins.
The formerly banned book list became my summer reading guide. The Catcher in the Rye was probably the first non-genre book I ever read. Holden Caulfield was my first literary hero—a child of privilege with a deep and intuitive distrust of the world he was meant to inherit. He didn’t know what system was screwing him, but he knew it was bullshit.
Little wonder, then, that I fell in with the suburban punk crowd: a crew of smart, overcaffeinated, artsy kids who chain-smoked over a shared bottomless pot of coffee at Perkins until curfew, cut class to go to the independent bookstore, and talked big about smashing the state without knowing how a zoning board worked. We were anti-establishment in that very specific way that only the safely housed and securely fed can be. Every other black biker jacket had a big sloppy red A in a circle painted on the back. We didn’t really know what it meant—only that anarchy sounded like freedom. No rules. No bosses. No moral scolding from Ronnie Raygun or our principals or the PTA.
I wasn’t the only one who picked up Ayn Rand with a head full of personal freedom and a belly full of realpolitik. Her books hit like scripture. Atlas Shrugged was a gospel for kids who wanted to believe that everyone else was faking it and they were the only ones telling the truth. Rand made it feel noble to be alienated, to be misunderstood, to refuse to play along. You don’t owe anyone anything. Think for yourself. The world is full of moochers and manipulators. Protect your mind. Protect your fire.
Her vision of the individual against the mob blended almost perfectly with the punk ethos. Never mind that her heroes were railroad barons and skyscraper architects. I didn’t care about the money. I just didn’t want anyone telling me what to do.
And that was the contradiction I couldn’t see yet: I was anti-Reagan and pro-Rand, anti-wealth but suspicious of the poor, anti-establishment but pro-market. I hated war, loved freedom, distrusted government, and hadn’t yet learned the difference between freedom from interference and freedom to live a decent life without begging for it. And I certainly hadn’t noticed that nobody gets anywhere on their own.
Main character energy
College campuses in the early ’90s were a concentrated soup of identity experimentation. Everyone freshly uprooted, shedding personas like old skin, trying on new beliefs and haircuts. You could reinvent yourself completely in a semester and nobody called you on it because they were doing the same thing.
I arrived at a respected midwestern liberal arts program having auditioned my way in—I’d earned my spot, and that mattered to me. The theatre department had a rule: freshmen couldn’t perform in mainstage productions. I thought that was stupid. So I compiled a series of scenes I’d written into a one-act play, signed up for a public campus space, and staged it with an all-freshman cast. It wasn’t just rebellion. It was enterprise—a new thing in the world because I willed it into being. Rand would have approved.
But even Objectivism doesn’t fully kill the need to belong. Her heroes weren’t loners by preference; they were exceptional people seeking worthy equals. I’d been reading Bukowski and Thompson by then, so naturally I rushed the fraternity with the party hearty reputation. My worthy equals.
I got along great with the guys, or so I thought. I could keep up with the banter, hold my liquor, throw out a good one-liner. Then I showed up to the formal pre-bid dinner wearing a denim jacket with a hand-painted Patrick Nagel nude on the back instead of a sports coat. A little pop art, a little provocation. I thought it was funny. What I didn’t admit, even to myself, was that I wanted to be seen and chosen. Those two things don’t always cooperate.
When the bids came out, mine wasn’t there. Rand’s philosophy is beautifully useful when you’re eighteen and getting your bearings: it makes rejection feel like proof you’re doing something right. Being misunderstood isn’t a tragedy—it’s a badge of honor. That snub didn’t feel like failure. It felt like foreshadowing.
Born again capitalist
I transferred to a liberal arts school in my hometown the next year—ostensibly to be nearer my high school girlfriend. When that relationship fizzled before the summer was halfway over, I found myself gravitating toward old friends who’d come back from their first year of college with a more future-facing outlook. I was still worshiping at the shrine of Rand, and the robber barons were starting to look like they might’ve been onto something.
By fall semester I’d traded my trench coat for khakis. Half-digested Rush Limbaugh hot takes became my talking points. I wasn’t a Republican—I had no interest in culture war purity tests or moral scolding—but the unrepentant “me first” attitude suited the new me. I pledged a fraternity, got drunk with the best of them, found my place on the artsy fringe of the popular crowd. Personal freedom was the answer. What was the question?
It was around this time I discovered the capital-L Libertarian Party. If I’m honest, marijuana legalization was probably my first real policy position. I found a t-shirt at the local head shop with the Bill of Rights on the front, stamped with Void Where Prohibited by Law in bright orange letters. On the back, the Libertarian Party. Imagine my surprise: a political party that understood how government was an obstacle between me and the life I wanted to live. Objectivism with bumper stickers. I was smitten.
But then I took a history of marketing class, where I learned how Carnegie had used philanthropy to polish his public image while treating workers like disposable parts. I remember the professor saying, with no irony, that charitable foundations were “a strategic PR solution to labor unrest.” That pulled me up short. And yet I still idolized the builders. The problem wasn’t that Carnegie had gotten rich—it was how he’d done it. The rigged contracts, the cozy deals with politicians, the playing field kept permanently tilted in his favor. That wasn’t capitalism. That was collusion. Cronyism by handshake.
I didn’t know it yet, but something had started to crack. If the system could be gamed that completely, then the meritocracy I believed in wasn’t a description of reality. It was a sales pitch. I filed that thought away and went back to the party.
No man is an island
The marketing class had planted a question I couldn’t quite shake, and business administration felt like surrendering to it. So I ended up in political science, looking for footnotes to justify the way I already wanted to live.
By junior year I was being handed Marx and Gramsci and words like hegemony. I was still rolling my eyes at Soviet communism—that hadn’t changed—but the critiques of capitalism scratched the same punk-rock itch that had drawn me to Rand: the sense that someone was rigging the game and lying to the masses about it. So I started reading off-syllabus. That’s how I found Malcolm X, Chomsky, Kropotkin, Bakunin.
And just like that, my libertarianism started to crack.
Here’s what nobody had ever made me think about: I’d worked crap retail and restaurant jobs since I was sixteen. I assumed they were supposed to suck. That was just the deal—you endure it and eventually earn your way out. What I hadn’t considered, not once, was that those jobs were necessary. That someone had to do them. That work society depends on ought to pay a living wage—not as charity, but as basic moral accounting.
Kropotkin is the one who broke it open. His argument wasn’t about charity or conventional fairness. It was about how humans actually work. We didn’t claw out of the caves through rugged individualism. We got out through mutual aid—cooperation, collective memory, shared labor. The self-made man who builds the railroad through sheer force of will is the myth. The workers who laid the track are the reality.
I had been, without knowing it, the world’s most earnest housecat—convinced I was a hunter because I’d never had to catch my own food. Every “independent” thing I’d accomplished had been built on a foundation I hadn’t laid and didn’t acknowledge. The play I’d staged? Public campus space, a faculty that tolerated me, an education my parents had paid for. The meritocracy I believed in? A game I’d entered with a head start I’d mistaken for talent.
That’s when the manufactured scarcity argument landed. Competition, I was starting to see, wasn’t a feature of human nature—it was a response to conditions. When there isn’t enough, people compete. When there is enough and people still compete as if there isn’t—when scarcity is engineered to keep people running in place—that’s not the market working. That’s the market being weaponized. I wouldn’t have put it so clearly at the time. But I felt it.
By the time I entered the workforce I knew one thing: unfettered free market capitalism wasn’t going to produce the world I wanted to live in. The myth of the level playing field had finally collapsed. Not everyone got to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Some people didn’t have boots.
I’ve written before about John Rawls, whose contractarian theory of justice finally gave me a frame for what a better system might look like. Design society from behind a veil of ignorance—without knowing where you’d land in it—and you’d build something that guaranteed basic liberties for everyone, where inequality could only be justified if it benefited the least well-off. Free markets, fine. Innovation, sure. But not if the cost is poverty, sickness, or despair.
Put away childish things
I still believe in freedom, but I no longer believe in fairy tales.
The perfect libertarian free market is not morally bankrupt in theory. From where we stand, a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, it’s simply never going to happen. Not in a country where wealth and power have compounded across generations. Not in a world where capital moves freely but workers don’t. Not in a system that requires the poor to prove their moral worth before they’re allowed to eat.
I still find something beautiful in anarcho-syndicalism—in the idea that people can govern themselves through cooperation and consensus, that mutual aid can replace coercion, that no one should wield power they haven’t earned. The kid in the biker jacket wasn’t wrong about everything. He was wrong about where freedom comes from.
Here’s what keeps me up at night: when corporations operate like nations and billionaires have their own space programs, the only force on Earth with even a theoretical capacity to check them is a democratic state. A government of the people, by the people, that still remembers what that phrase means.
Which means I—the punk who wanted to smash the state—have landed on the conclusion that the state is the only hammer big enough for the job. Not because I trust it. Not because I think it’s clean or honest or reliably ours. But because I don’t see another tool that scales to the problem.
That’s the tragedy of it, if I’m being honest. I spent my formative years raging against the machine and I’ve concluded: we need a better machine—democratically owned, wrested from the people who’ve captured it, wielded on behalf of the people who built it. Which requires trusting institutions I know are compromised, electing politicians I know are inadequate, and working within a system I’d still prefer to burn down on my better days.
They say if you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain. I don’t know. I think if you’re lucky, you get enough life experience to grow a conscience. To put away divisive absolutes and start looking for something that actually works—while keeping alive the part of you that knows the current arrangement is unacceptable.
The libertarian I used to be wanted freedom without obligation. The person I am now wants the same freedom—for everyone, rooted in fairness, with no one stepping on someone else’s throat to get there. The market has its place. It doesn’t get to be God.