In my case, I grew up in a single parent family where my mother was totally apolitical. I don’t recall a single discussion of politics at all with my mother. We were very poor, and lived in tract housing where almost every family there was on welfare. My mother worked for minimum wage, and my brother and I both worked from the age of 13 or so, so we wouldn’t have to go on welfare.
So I came about my conservative beliefs purely from my own experiences and from my own reading and reflection. I saw first-hand what welfare did to people, and I didn’t like it. Many of the other people living in my neighborhood were in single parent families where the mom stayed home on welfare. Many of my friends had mothers like this, and to an amazing extent they were lazy, bitter, angry at the government for not giving them more, and consigned to their status in life. Many were alcoholics, and a couple of my friends were beaten, locked out of their houses, and in general had miserable lives. They were stigmatized by being on welfare, they lacked self-esteem as a result of being wards of the state, and made no attempt to better themselves.
In contrast, my family always had a strong work ethic. It was simply unthinkable that we would accept handouts from anyone else. Too much pride. So we worked, and we saved. Eventually, my mom saved enough to put a down payment on a tiny house. We moved out of the tract housing and into our own house. As the value of the house increased, my mom used it to buy herself a little country store, and did just fine. She recently sold the store and retired to a comfortable modest living.
Today, many of those people I grew up with are still living in that tract housing, and their children are living there too. Welfare for them was a trap that allowed them to indulge their weaknesses and which sapped them of their belief that they could do better. Their children grew up without role models, and came to believe the same thing.
I came to believe that welfare was soul-deading and destructive. So when I was old enough, I started reading about economics and social policy, and the stuff I read on the left just didn’t sound right to me. It didn’t match my own experiences. The free market, libertarian, economically conservative thought matched up perfectly. When I read about the disincentive effects of welfare, I knew it was true. When I read others saying that social assistance should be temporary and always of a form that helped someone up rather than just making them comfortable, I agreed. And when I read about communism I knew exactly why it wouldn’t work, and at the time I did a lot of reading about the Soviet Union and other communist states, and what I saw there reinforced everything I believed about the nature of state power and what redistributionist policies really do.
At the same time, growing up on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’, I knew lots of people that your typical suburban Republican wouldn’t have anything to do with. Bikers, drug users, hard working blue collar guys. These were my friends. That led me to being a social libertarian. I saw nothing wrong with their chosen lifestyles, so long as they were paying their own way. Most of them were very happy in their chosen lifestyles. One of the nicest guys I knew worked for a rail company by day, and by night he liked to come home, light a joint, listen to music, and play his guitar. I spent many an enjoyable evening at his place, and it infuriated me that what he was doing was seen to be criminal and that some would punish him for it. I find that abhorrent.
The other influence on my life was my grandparents. I was very close to them, because my mom would ship us off to live with them on the farm for half the year. Both of them worked their asses off, and were a living example that liberal claims that the poor can’t help their lot in life were simply not true. When I was born, my grandparents lived in the same tract housing I grew up in. My grandfather was 53 years old, and was working as a pump jockey in a gas station. He also did other work on the side and after hours to make extra money. He had a grade 9 education, and my grandmother a high school diploma. My grandfather had a bad back, and if anyone had a claim to being unable to make it in society, it was them.
However, they eventually saved enough to put a small down payment on a tiny farm in Saskatchewan. It was a decrepit old farm, with a house built in the late 1800’s which had no running water and no heat. Both of them worked their asses off on that farm (as did I), and my grandfather worked as an insurance adjuster in the off season to pay the bills. Eventually, he built a new modern house with his own hands and the help of the neighbors. Through hard work, they turned that beat-up old farm into a little jewel, year by year. They had a happy life, and when they retired they sold the farm for half a million dollars and retired in comfort. Neither of them had a handout, and neither had much of an education. They just knew how to work, and how to save. Their example made me less tolerant of the argument that the poor ‘can’t help it’, and my experience in a welfare neighborhood made me see how self-induced much of the poverty around me was.
Let me say something about the neighbors on the farm. The other thing I learned from that experience is that the best charity is local charity. Government charity creates resentment, and splits people into groups - those who give, and those who take. It’s not good for society. But absent government charity, communities come together and help each other, and the effects of that were positive. The people of the community helped my grandparents build a new house. My grandparents felt immense gratitude for that, and displayed it by ‘passing it on’. We went and helped others do the same. At harvest time, if someone fell ill the rest of us would go to his farm to help pull the crops in. This kind of charity sets examples. It binds communities together. It brings out the good in people. Forced redistribution by government creates resentment and a culture of dependency. Not only that, it displaces private charity and helps destroy communities by removing the need for people to depend on their neighbors. It is destructive.
As a teen, I gravitated towards the writing of Robert Heinlein, who shared the same individualistic, self-determination ethic that I had. Not having a dad, my role models were the father figures and young men in Heinlein’s fiction, and I believe that influenced my thinking and helped place my ‘moral center’ where it is today.
As I got older, I started reading social and political philosophy: Hume, Mill, Hobbes, Von Mises, Hayek, etc. Hayek and Friedman in particular really influenced my ‘adult’ political beliefs. Hayek showed how regulatations beget more regulations, and how chosing the state as your instrument of social justice really was the ‘Road to Serfdom’. He also showed how government simply cannot work well, because it lacks the information that the market has. There are sound structural reasons to prefer a free market over government control. Friedman gave spirited, principled defenses of capitalism and the market not just on moral grounds, but on practical ones. He showed how the market is not anarchy, how there are powerful forces that lead economic actors into the ‘right’ paths, and how the market is actually pretty good at protecting works and consumers.
Thus my philosophy: make your own way in life. Demand nothing from others. Do not interfere with others unless they are interfering with you. Avoid the trap of believing that government can cure society’s ills, because it usually just makes it worse.