I’m a 26 year old (born 1990) college dropout working on the floor of my grandpa’s machine shop in northern Michigan.
My goals in life are to: become financially sovereign, to immerse myself and become learned in the history and culture of western civilization, to become a knight in the realm of ideas from economics to the liberal arts, to travel the world and experience different cultures while being an exemplary representative of my own, to be an avid reader, a prolific writer and a champion of what is true and beautiful. In other words I want to become a 21st century renaissance man aka a medieval guerrilla.
My journey began when I discovered Ron Paul in 2011. I had just begun seriously getting involved with politics, economics, philosophy, etc. – i.e. the realm of ideas – as a sophomore in college studying economics at Michigan State University. As I scoured the internet watching youtube videos of debates between republicans and democrats I was clearly on the side of the republicans as I was convinced of freedom in general, the free market, and local self-government and I also took no real interest in foreign policy. But I got the feeling that something was still missing. I didn’t know what it was at the time but the republicans seemed to be jerks who talked over guests and judged other republicans much differently than they did democrats. In other words they were inconsistent just as the democrats were inconsistent, but they paid lip service to more things I agreed with so I figured I guess I’m a republican who likes Bush, FoxNews, and Sean Hannity.
Then I stumbled across a video of Ron Paul and everything changed.
Right away I noticed that he was consistent in applying views regardless of party. He was principled. He then introduced me to Austrian economics, the natural rights tradition, a foreign policy of neutrality, all while maintaining very conservative principles of faith, family and tradition. I didn’t know it at the time but at that moment I became a conservatarian.
As my college years rolled along I became more immersed in Austrian economics and the liberty movement by watching Ron Paul videos and visiting sites like lewrockwell.com and mises.org. In my senior year (2013), after taking the LSAT and contemplating which law school to attend, I became concerned with where my life was going and if this is what I really wanted to do. Did I really want to take on $100,000+ in additional debt to become a lawyer when it was becoming clear to me that I wasn’t all that interested in law but was very interested in economics, geopolitics, and financial markets? It was at that moment that I fully committed to the Austrian an-cap tradition and decided law school wasn’t for me and that I was going to make my way on my own and build my own hedge fund from the ground up.
So if I wasn’t going to go to law school what was my next move? As I realized that my only real career paths with a degree in economics were in sales, and that I had fundamentally lost who I truly was, I decided I’d rather build my nest egg doing blue collar work while recommitting myself to faith and family. So I decided, with only one semester to go, to drop out of school and return home.
That summer I worked a host of odd jobs before I finally landed at the machine shop in the spring of 2014.
As I began to work I did everything in my power to lower my costs and maximize my income in order to start saving as much money as possible. At the same time I took it upon myself to learn as much about economics, history, etc. as I possibly could. This began with reading lists and ordering copious amounts of books that I read as much as possible. This experiment in auto-didacticism took a dramatic turn for the better when I became a member of Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom. This wonderful site provided me with lecture series to put on my iPod and listen to all day while working. Just recently (2017) I became a member of Ron Paul’s Homeschool Curriculum and added their courses on American history, government and literature to my repertoire.
Now I am a successful machine operator who has learned more in the last 4 years on my own than I ever could have hoped for by staying in college. More importantly I got to learn the stuff I wanted to learn without having to jump through pointless hoops set up by uninterested professors. I have saved a substantial sum of money and built a short position on the S&P 500 in anticipation of the ABCT.
This blog is another step along my path of obtaining the goals I laid out at the beginning. No one is going to hand you success but it must be earned and built-up piece by piece and day by in order to reach the goals you aspire too and become the person you want to be.