Submitted by Sachin Munshi

I used to be a staunch social conservative especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on NYC, while being pretty progressive on the fiscal side. It was the Patriot Act and the Iraq War that turned me vehemently against the George W. Bush administration, and I registered as an Independent voting for the very first time in the 2008 Presidential election for Barack Obama. I didn’t vote at all in 2012 or 2016 primarily due to my ill health and progressively worsening physical and respiratory challenges and because my Obama romance had worn off a bit (though I still liked him over the burgeoning Teabagger crowd of the GOP lol) and I just didn’t like Hillary, Donald, and Bernie.

It was after 2016 that I started dabbling in the ideologies of libertarianism and anarcho-syndicalism, with Reason magazine being an occasional reading interest, mainly agreeing with its anti-Trump articles, but considering myself as a centrist worried about the national debt and the related fiscal unsustainability of Social Security and LBJ’s Great Society, as a recipient of SSI and Medicaid. I voted for Joe Biden in 2020 mainly out of disdain for Trump, after which I decided to join the Libertarian Party to see if I had a place there instead of the D and R corrupt corporate duopoly. Sadly, with the rise of the pandemic, I began to notice an apparent lack of empathy among many of the more right leaning and Mises Caucus folks in the LP, mainly in lock step with the Trumpian and authoritarian right. This is why I quit the LP, embraced Georgism, and joined the DFC now as a left-libertarian Independent.