I used to consider myself a libertarian quite some time ago. But my thoughts on that matter eventually changed as I found more and more to be disgusted with in the overall libertarian milieu. One of my pet peeves was how libertarian writers always seemed to talk down to their audience when attempting to persuade. I think I finally realized that it wasn’t necessarily the speaker/writer so much as the subject matter. There was really no way to explain the benevolence of markets without insulting the audience’s intelligence and denying their own everyday experiences. Once I started to dig deeper in that subject matter, I came to realize that markets don’t exist in the absence of states (regulations) and that the struggle isn’t people versus state; or business versus state; or people versus business and state, but people versus institutions. And as long as institutions are held inviolate while the people they supposedly exist at the behest of are treated as little more than fuel for them, there will be no end to the cycle.