LFReasons Posted February 11, 2013 Posted February 11, 2013 Hi everyone, just wanted to introduce myself as a new member of this forum. I spent a few years as an avid Objectivist, but the many subtle (and some amazingly brazen) contradictions inherent to that chain of reasoning made me unable to justify it without prodigious amounts of mental hand-waving, which strikes me as the exact opposite of objectivity. I'm still very grateful to Ayn Rand for the tremendous intellectual growth that her work triggered within me, but I no longer go along with her advocacy of minarchy. In retrospect, I find it quite amusing that I once claimed to advocate reason and the non-aggression principle while simulataneously going along with Rand's often laughable and contrived arguments for the necessity of government (essentially, that there needs to be an objective (?!) set of rules for everyone to be bound by) The final nail in the coffin of my Objectivist phase was Roy Childs Jr.'s open letter to Ayn Rand, entitled "Objectivism and The State". I did and still do find it to be a brilliant and concise refutation of Objectivist politics. I highly recommend this to any minarchist, but particularly to minarchists of the Objectivist variety. So, if you have any Objectivist friends or associates that are still on the fence about the "necessity" of government, this may help them to see reason. Anyway, that's the barebones version of how I got to voluntarism. I look forward to having having many stimulating and enlightening discussions with all of you.
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