Make no mistake about it. It’s so easy to become a socialist. Why? Think about it, when you have access to free money, wouldn’t you be a socialist as well? When you live in a system where you don’t have to work hard just so you can keep body and soul together, wouldn’t you be a socialist?

You have to understand that socialism really is built on a very old concept. It’s build on one part of the human condition that has essentially gone unchanged for thousands of years. Ever since the dawn of time, people have been trying to get something for nothing. I know that sounds harsh and it definitely sounds judgmental, but it’s absolutely true.

Why should you work hard when you can take a free ride off somebody else’s labor? It really all boils down to a very interesting analogy from nature. The analogy is the coo-coo bird. The coo-coo doesn’t make nests. It doesn’t incubate its eggs. Instead, the female would look for the nest of unrelated birds from other species and lay its egg in their nests.

What do you think happens next? The coo-coo egg is genetically adapted to hatch faster than the host species of birds. The coo-coo is not dumb. It selects certain species because it has adapted the knowledge. It doesn’t know this directly, but just through sheer evolution that other species’ eggs hatch slower.

So the coo-coo chick hatches first and what do you think it does? It actually has evolved a notch in its back to make it easier for it to push out the eggs of the host birds. Soon enough, the host birds are clueless as to what happened and they keep feeding the coo-coo. They hunt and forage for food and they feed the coo-coo day in day out.

Soon enough, the coo-coo is actually much bigger than its “parents” Soon enough, the coo-coo chick leaves the nest and the process starts all over again. I give you this analogy because that highlights and sums up what being a socialist is like.

When you’re a socialist, you basically say that people must share your values and your values really revolve around the idea that you have some sort of moral claim to somebody’s labor. That’s really what it boils down to. Why? It takes labor to produce money.

So if you are claiming that a large chunk of a person’s money should go to some sort of social program to help people who have nothing, you are essentially making the source of that money your slave. You probably would feel better about yourself because you’re saying, “these are the rich that I’m taxing.” How do you think they got rich?

Do you think that money came out of nowhere? Do you think it fell on their lap? Of course not. Wealth, for the most part, is created through a voluntary exchange of value for value. In other words, Bill Gates became the richest man on the planet because people needed windows machines. People needed the windows operating system and all the other software created by Microsoft.

It’s not like people woke up the next day and said “That Bill Gates guy is a nice fellow, let’s send him a check.” It doesn’t work that way. For wealth to be created, there has to be an exchange of value. The same applies to Steve Jobs. He came up with the idea of the iPad and the iPhone. Do you see how this works?

It’s easy to become a socialist because you look at everybody else as your slave. But here’s the question. Would you want that done to you? It’s great when stuff is flowing one way, but when you’re on the receiving end, it’s not fun.

This is a confessional. This is a real life personal story. I used to be a liberal. I used to believe that the state should tax rich people and give that money to poor people. I used to believe that the state should always be involved in all economic decisions because the state knows best. It’s all about redistribution. You take wealth where it’s being wasted and you give it to people who deserve it because they’re poor.

I used to think that there’s no such thing as a social problem that the state can’t fix. Whether it’s employment, poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, the state was the answer. In fact, if I look at my past political positions, liberal is probably putting it mildly. The better label would be communist.

I truly believe that there was a lot of waste in society and that waste was almost always perpetrated by rich people. These are people who have more money than they could count and how have no moral claim to that money. It’s unfair that life just worked out this way where 1% owned 60% of the wealth. It’s an outrage.

I truly believed in Karl Marx who said “to each according to his need and from each according to his ability.” Sounds awesome, right? Unfortunately, liberalism and, to a certain extent and its most extreme form, communism are essentially two sides of the same coin. Just like with everything else in life, there are many things that look good on paper that are flat out nightmares in reality.

If you need proof of this, just look at places like Cuba, Russia under Stalin, Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and currently Maduro. They’re shit holes. Nobody in their right mind would want to live there. Of course, a lot of these were completely hidden from me because I didn’t want to see it. I was a liberal I was a broke college student living on scholarship money and I believed that I deserved free money.

So what changed my mind? How did I go from liberal to conservative? In other words, how do I go from being clueless to being an adult? I got a job. It only took me one look at my paycheck to see what’s up. I started making really good money right after college and a huge chunk of that went to taxes. I got really excited when my boss promoted me and I started making a hundred thousand dollars a year.

You know how much my take home pay increased? It only increased by one thousand dollars per pay check. That was an outrage. I worked hard to reach that level and to earn that money and the state all too easily and all too greedily took my money. That’s how I disabused myself of being a liberal.

Liberalism is only fun when you’re on the receiving end of free cash. But believe me, if you are a proud person who like to earn your way through life and who would like to earn your keep, liberalism is an insult because it’s basically built on the assumption or the conceit that everybody else is a slave.

When you believe that the state has the moral right to take a large portion of somebody’s hard earned money, in other words, the fruit of that person’s labor, you are saying that you have a superior right to that person’s labor because that labor is require to produce that money.

You’ve essentially turned that person into a slave. You may be thinking what’s the big deal. Well, woul you like it done to you? My point exactly.

One of the god fathers, if you want to call him that, of the modern conservative movement is William F. Buckley. Mr. Buckley, of course, is the founder of The National Review magazine-American conservatism’s de facto house magazine going on seven decades. He published The National Review for a very long time. The The National Review, of course, is the organ of American conservatism.

Mr. Buckley is a very singular figure in the evolution of American conservatism because he really bent over backwards to define what conservatism is and what it isn’t. This was not easy because in the late 50’s, there were all sorts of crack pots and lunatics claiming to be conservative. These are people who believe in all sorts of weird conspiracies and they hated communism. It’s one thing to hate communism as an ideological system. It’s another to see communism in everything about American life and that’s how crazy this extremist fringe was.

Buckley, to his credit, completely eliminated that wing of the conservatives. He shamed them, humiliated them and essentially drummed them out of the conservative wing of American politics. He also articulated a series of beliefs that went a long way in defining what conservatism is.

Basically what he was saying is that society has its own internal mechanisms to evolve to where it needs to go. Government shouldn’t step in. Economic realities are often enough to make society change on its own pace. He doesn’t believe in active government intervention just as he doesn’t believe in over taxing.

This is the essence of conservatism. That’s what they’re conserving that this natural tendency for any kind of human system, regardless of how complex, to essentially tune itself. Whether you agree with classic economists or not, you would at least agree that capitalism has a self tuning mechanism.

When factories produce products that nobody wants, that tuning mechanism comes in the form of losses. On the other hand, when consumers demand a particular type of product and there’s not enough of it in stock or in the market, that kind of self tuning mechanisms takes the form of rising prices. Higher prices trigger people looking to make a buck to lease or buy factories to crank out stuff that is in high demand. This boosts supply and depresses prices. In other words, Americans are able to get more and more stuff for lower and lower prices. Best, of all, if the incentives are high enough, consumers are guaranteed a nice range of choices.

The reverse can also be true. When the state seeks to ‘protect’ one set of producers against competition, the state essentially robs consumers of choices and money because prices become artificially high. It makes for great social policy to guarantee an open platform where people can compete based on price signals.

This is the essence of conservatism. You leave these internal processes alone just as you can’t make jobs magically appear thanks to infrastructure spending, you can’t magically make people virtuous and non discriminating through government fiat an dictatorial regulatory state.

These are the values that conservatives are conserving because they’re valid now and they will probably continue to be valid long into the future.

Donald Trump is not exactly a traditional conservative politician. In fact, he’s not even a politician. That’s how confusing the age of Trump is to a lot of people. I’m not just talking about people on the right side of the spectrum. As much as they try to deny it or reduce Trump into some sort of devil or the second coming of Hitler, the left is also as stumped and stupefied by Donald Trump.

It’s easy to see why people are confused regarding this very enigmatic, yet loud political figure. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get to the heart of the issue. What truly throws off people about Donald Trump is that he’s neither left nor right.

Although the argument could be made that he is more on the right side of the political spectrum, this is not entirely convincing because there are certain parts of his public record as well as his public statements that is definitely on the left side of things.

He’s on the record for same sex marriage. He’s on the record for some sort of amnesty for undocumented immigrants to the US. These are hardly conservative positions. He’s also very big on massive infrastructure spending. Does that sound familiar? Well, it should. That’s classic new deal policy.

A lot of people on the right infrastructure spending because everybody knows that it doesn’t work. In fact, economists, have been jumping up and down since forever that pumped prime spending is a corrupt and inefficient way to resuscitate any economy. It just doesn’t work. In fact, when you look at the new deal and the huge amount of money spent on public work programs, you’re stumped because they never created the kind of mass broad based employment they were supposed to produce.

But to this very day, you have a chorus of academics. These are people who are supposedly smart and know better who keep the refrain coming. They keep repeating over and over again that big spending leads to a more robust economy.

Unfortunately, Trump has drunk the Kool Aid in disrespect. It’s easy to see the conservative side of Trump because he actually pushed a new policy in the executive branch. For every new regulation the executive branch will come up with, they would have to eliminate two old regulations. This has worked wonders because the huge regulatory state is actually beginning to scale back.

Trump is also known for his tax cut. This is hardly a liberal position. Now do you see why there is such a tremendous amount of apprehension and confusion about Donald Trump? In fact, there is such confusion that a lot of people are making a claim that conservatism somehow, someway is dead because of Trump.

I wouldn’t go that far. It’s definitely being redefined because the new power base of the GOP is shifting to white working class voters. For the longest time, the GOP has been the party of business owners. This is the party of the business establishment.

Judging from Trumps re-trick regarding trade and trade protection, it’s definitely shifting to the working class. If you believe that conservatism is somehow tied to protecting only company owners, then you may have a case for conservatism being obsolete in the face of all these Trump policies. But if you believe that conservatism is really tied to a set of cultural values regardless of class, then the argument could be made that regardless of the age of Trump, conservatism is here to stay.