Hello all! I finally joined the community and wanted to introduce myself and say hello. Please leave a comment s I can friend some of you. Below is a quick bio and where I've been so far. I was born in Houston, TX but now I call many places home. I am 27 years old. I own and run a music recording studio in Nashville, TN, and I own several other small businesses as well. I do, however, believe intellectual property is about as legitimate as the social contract (which is to say they are illegitimate). Anyway, Self-employment is incredible and I wouldn't ever trade my time for wages on a pre-set schedule like most people do. Anyway, I first stumbled upon the Austrian school by reading the Real Lincoln by DiLorenzo. My father was also a successful entrepreneur so I was born into wealth which granted me the privilege of attending a private school with a stellar education and many teachers that would change my life. Most in particular, in my sophomore year of high school, when I was 17, I had a humanities teacher that I would find to be the greatest mentor thus far in my life. He turned me from a Neo-conservative into a minarchist, when he turned me onto Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government. More Specifically, on the first day of his class, my teacher gave an over-view of the topics and thinkers we would be discussing and learning about and proceeded to make an off-handed comment about Lincoln being our worst president. I approached him after class and asked him more. He simply told me to research it for myself. I went home and did a search for "Lincoln worst president" and, coincidentally enough, stumbled onto a DiLorenzo article hosted on the Mises site. I wouldn't actually come back to the site for another year, but I did end up buying the Real lincoln, read it several times, and from my sophomore to senior year of high school, I proceeded to become a quasi-expert on The Civil War and Confederate apologetics, receiving several full rides to many universities based on the papers I wrote on the subject. Many classes in those universities would go on to use my paper in their history and economics classrooms as an opposing view to common teaching on the subject of The American Civil War. But I digress, starting my Junior year of high school, about a year into my independent research on the subject (literally pouring through private and public libraries for firsthand primary sources), I started to understand how closely inter-related economics was to the study of history. I knew I needed to understand it in the most logical way possible to explain much the historical phenomenon we have witnessed over the ages. I turned first to Milton Friedman because I always liked how simple he could articulate great logical principles, and I appreciated his persuasive and cool-headed debating style. However, I eventually found his opinions on the Federal Reserve to be a case of cognitive dissonance, and sought elsewhere for better economic interpretation. I again turned to DiLorenzo, remembering that he was an economist before he was a historian. I found him online and saw how much he was featured on Mises.org. The rest is history, having found my intellectual home among the Austrians. I studied austrian economics and praxeology in and out all the way through the rest of high school and did a three year plan to get my bachelors, rushing myself out of college as quickly as I possibly could (a fact I am happy with today, knowing how pointless and over-priced a college education can be [glad I didn't pay for it]). My first readings originating from the Austrian school were "For a New Liberty" by Rothbard, and "The Obviousness of Anarchy" by Hasnas, a scholar I wish Mises featured more of. From these readings, I was forever convinced of Government's evils and its inability to ever produce any kind of good. I had become a market anarchist forever.

I have been an active reader on the Mises site, using its many resources, for about 8 years now. I have been an active reader of the forums for about 4 years now and have decided to finally join to give my two cents. I hope to learn from you all. I cant wait to get started. Thanks for having me.