Why I’ll (Probably) Vote Next Week 
My 50-Year Transition Towards Conservatism

Brett, the young man who cuts my hair every three weeks, was an early voter this year. We talked about his choices – the votes he cast for the presidency, as well as those he cast for propositions on the Florida ballot.

I was surprised by how much study he told me he did before voting on the propositions, but he said that he felt that if he was going to vote, he should know what he was voting for or against. And I was more than a little humbled by our conversation.

I know Brett as a person with strong sentiments about most of the issues that divide American voters – freedom, equality, taxation, welfare, war, and more recently inflation, immigration, social justice, and abortion. So, I assumed he would cast his vote the way most Americans do: along party lines.

The fact that he had gone online and spent hours studying the pros and cons of all the propositions on the ballot reminded me of something I had gradually come to realize over the 54 years I’ve had the right to vote: I had little to no idea about who or what I was voting for.

During my 20s and 30s, I was a regular voter. I never spent any time studying the candidates or the issues I was voting for. I felt that I knew all I needed to know based on what I knew about the inclinations of my parents and favorite teachers – which were very much on the left.

I was, like so many young people today, a professed Communist and a card-carrying Conscientious Objector during my college years. I continued to protest the Vietnam War until it ended. And even then, as so many of my friends returned from their stints as soldiers and told me their stories, I developed an uncomfortable and disappointing distrust of my government and politics generally, not just the politicians that supported that war.

I declared myself an Independent. And I described my political views as many Independents do today: fiscally conservative, but socially liberal. That felt good. Even virtuous. But it was never helpful in making voting decisions because the Democrats at the time represented social liberalism while the Republicans were the party of fiscal restraint.

I tried to find a solution for this dilemma by, among other things, reading both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. But that only made things worse. Because I felt that the most important political issue was the question of war or peace, it became clear to me that President Eisenhower had been right when he warned Americans against the Military Industrial Complex, and I began to see both parties as pilgrims marching to the same Holy Site, just wearing differently colored clothes.

This led to several decades of mostly not voting. I could see clearly that both parties were aligned in supporting and extending the Cold War that had started soon after I was born, and that, for the most part, social welfare spending and taxes were going up regardless of which party was in office and/or dominant in the legislature.

When my youthful goal of becoming a writer morphed into becoming a publisher, I was forced to understand economics as it operates where the economy takes place – i.e., in business, rather than in government and non-profit institutions and academia.

And that changed my perspective a third time. I was still a fiscal conservative. And although I was still a strong believer in the sharing of wealth (all forms of wealth), I no longer believed that government could ever do a good job of that. On the contrary, my beliefs about the effective way to share wealth were almost entirely opposed to the philosophy that drives the social welfare programs of government and even most of the largest non-profit charities.

I am thinking seriously about voting this year, but although I feel like I know enough to make the right choice for the presidency, I haven’t done any work on Florida’s propositions – as Brett has – and I feel obliged to get that done before I make my final decision.

And this brings us to three of the things that I hope you’ll pay particular attention to in this issue, all of which might influence your decisions (present and future) as a voter: a quiz, a video lesson on basic economic theory, and a book review (one of the four book reviews in this issue) about the ideas of one of the world’s greatest economists.