Brandon Kirby is Being Libertarian‘s former Assignment Editor.
He grew up in a small town in scenic Eastern Canada. Nearly every home had a gun and no one was shot. Churches were on every street corner. If they noticed one of their neighbours was building a deck, or a shed, the whole neighbourhood would file in and finish the job in half a day. The main form of entertainment was a corn boil with sugar cookies.
His friends in high school were socialists. He was impressed with their knowledge of world affairs and the fact that they cared about the disenfranchised, and he was swept up in their ideology. It seemed posh, charitable, intellectual, and he drank it like kool-aid on a hot summer day. He became a socialist under token peer pressure.
When Brandon arrived at university on day one, his first class was an economics class. They learned about Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the efficiency of market forces. The elegance of this picture was astounding and inspiring. The effect that these ideas had on the world was the most significant improvement in the well-being of the average individual in the history of our species. Poverty is being crushed by Adam Smith’s philosophy and this contravened the ideology of his old friends. The government waged a war on poverty, on drugs, on guns, and it not only failed in its belligerence the government seemed to make things worse. Capitalism worked. Consequently he abandoned a failed model for a working model. Brandon became a libertarian and he never looked back. He was politically active and he read every book he could on Austrian economics.
Brandon studied philosophy as his major and in his spare time took classes to become a financial advisor to understand the full elegance of the system. This was fortunate, because after graduation he found out it wasn’t possible to get paid to sit around reading Thomas Aquinas and Nietzsche, so he fell back on his spare time studies and got involved with finances.
With respect to politics he had contented himself to let the politicians work out whatever schemes they may. He opted to pursue career advancement over politics and neglected political involvement. This came to an abrupt halt in the summer of 2014. In his provincial jurisdiction they held an election and the victor won on the promise of deficit budgets to alleviate their provincial woes. The economic results were predictable in that they sunk deeper into financial misery.
Brandon was galvanized and became interested in reversing cavalier attitudes and dismissal toward sound economic policy. In 2015 Canada experienced a major setback as their prime minister campaigned on the same promise – more debts, and regrettably he won a landslide majority. This strengthened Brandon’s resolve.
He became more involved with libertarian groups and more engaged in the political process. When he noticed that Being Libertarian was asking for contributions to our written work, he gleefully enlisted to help spread the message that big government is the pathway to poverty, while liberty is the true charitable option leading to prosperity. It’s Brandon’s belief that a liberated future is worth the pursuit and it’s worth pursuing like a thunderbolt.
