Hello, World!

So after some time of waning interest in blogging via Xanga and Myspace, I've decided to start more of an official blog for myself. This blog will not be explicitly tied to my professional or personal life. My intention is to simply have an outlet for for my own personal interpretation of current events and to entertain various ideas and concepts that might interest me. My audience will be fairly limited, consisting mostly of close acquaintances and people who share similar interests, but I invite anyone and everyone to participate and interact if you feel compelled.

Since most of my posts will pertain largely to social issues, religion, economics, and political philosophy, I'll get the ball rolling by giving you a base idea about where I'm coming from;

On social issues, I'm fairly liberal. My general contention is if you're not aggressing upon anyone else's persons or property, then you're generally free to do whatever you wish. And while I have a general disdain for government, I also have a general respect for the due process and federalism that restrains it. In this way, I find that although I often agree with liberals on issues like gay marriage and the like, I often find myself at odds with the means they wish to employ to meet those ends which often, I feel, show a fairly ignorant disregard for the legislative process and ultimately cede more power to the government over social issues in the long run.

On religious issues, I would generally consider myself to be agnostic. I was raised Catholic and I do still hold quite a deal of respect for the direction of Catholic teachings and Christian morality in general. I make no apologies for people who hold their faith blindly, fervently, and to the detriment of others, but I also do not hold disdain or disregard for anyone who has adopted a belief system based on faith or tradition.

In terms of my economics, I've come to advocate free-market economies based primarily on the non-aggression axiom and natural law theory of Murray Rothbard and others. My belief in laissez faire economics stems from the general belief in the primacy of property rights and basic human action and motivation as described by Ludwig von Mises and Carl Menger. The actual stream of economic thought that I find myself aligned the most with is that of the Austrian school. I also have some general sympathies towards the Chicago school branch of neo-classical analytics although I would still refute some of their general interventionist tendencies.

As far as political philosophy in general is concerned, most people would consider me to have strong libertarian tendencies. I hold a fairly strong disdain for authoritarian-centric philosophies of all kinds.....which generally means I find myself in fights with liberals and conservatives alike depending on the issue. I find myself fighting conservatives on their inclination to legislate moral imperatives and their willingness to sacrifice freedoms in the name of national security. And at the same time I find myself fighting liberals for propagating many ridiculous economic fallacies and also for their "progressive" push towards socialism and more recently fascism. Because of my heart-felt belief that maintaining property rights are essential to both freedom and prosperity, I often find myself sympathizing with conservatives more often than liberals as they now hold the classically liberal view on economics after progressives and socialites in the democratic party abandoned it in favor of social utilitarian sympathies after the turn of the 20th century. In terms of the government itself, I'm in strong favor of incredibly small governments of the John Locke style designed primarily to ensure contract and tort law. As far as structure, I find myself in favor of the Jeffersonian interpretation of a constitution-bound federal body ceding primarily to a system of federalism in which the states are fairly autonomous. I generally believe that if we are to accept the idea of a governing body at all, the best check against its power is the diffusion of it among smaller bodies. However, philosophically I do have some strong anarcho-capitalist tendencies concerning the move towards a stateless society in the manner suggested by Rothbard. And no, having anarchist sympathies does not mean I throw bombs and have adopted a pseudonym based on the name of a weekday.

This is a general outline of my basic beliefs and probably a fairly good indicator of the types of things you'll see me discussing here. So I encourage anyone who shares similar interests and even those who may vehemently disagree with me to join in and converse. I think you'll find that I'm a pretty reasonable person.