Thread by @gauravsabnis

Tangent. Longtime followers will know that in my blogging days and then until about 2010, I was very much in the libertarian camp. Influenced heavily by American blogs, sitting in India, bonding over how much the Driver's License Bureau or Passport Office or Post Office sucks.

https://twitter.com/gauravsabnis/status/1323333880397660160

It's very easy in India to loathe any government agency, because most of them are designed and run like obstacle courses, no matter which party is in power. There is a huge power imbalance in the citizen - government employee equation, favoring the latter.

And at least back then, private players, wherever allowed in the early days of economic reforms, were noticeably more efficient and less asshole-ish than government employees whose job was to provide you with a service. So the private > public message of libertarians resonated.

In 2006, I moved to the US. Within just a couple of years, started questioning the intellectual honesty, of not sanity of those US libertarians whose whines about the DMV or Post Office or Medicare or regulatory agencies. Because, and this is what shocked me, government works!

The American state apparatus is nowhere close to flawless, but it largely works for and with its citizens. Not all citizens are equal in that regard, of course. But the government did not seem like the problem to me, as a Reagan quote I loved in India had suggested.

Another big eye-opener for me was something personally tragic, but politically illuminating - frequent interactions with the US and Indian healthcare systems as a relative or caregiver. I went from rooting for Medicare cuts and opposing the ACA, to, in recent years, the opposite.

I don't mind paying my taxes to the federal govt or NY state or even that extra 4% for NYC because I'm largely getting something in return from them. And my frequent visits to Europe showed that government..."BIG government 😲"... largely works there without being USSR.

This thread was a thinking aloud exercise for a longform piece I've been working on for months titled "Why I became a libertarian and then stopped being a libertarian". Slow progress because teaching heavy semester plus first time on zoom. Hopefully over the winter break.

Oh, an important point I forgot. I also experienced that private companies in the US weren't necessarily super efficient or friendly. In fact private companies gave me more headaches than the government. And then the Indian private sector went that way too.

Once the "private good, public bad" principle melts away, it's hard to continue being a libertarian, at least an intellectually honest one. I tried for a couple of years. Didn't work. I simply cannot agree with "taxation is theft" anymore. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Twitter was a huge factor too. I often say that blogs made me libertarian and twitter made me a progressive/liberal/whatever label you want to assign to me. On blogs,I mostly inhabited a libertarian bubble. Twitter burst it and how! Y'all taught me a lot!

For years I scoffed at the concept of privilege or affirmative action as vapid post-modern leftist gobbledegook. Twitter and a few friends outside my usual upper caste indian bubble made me not only understand privilege, but acknowledge my own. And that of those close to me.

Not just my privilege as a brahmin male in india (duh!) but also in the US. I stan Sen. Harris but it's not surprising that the third ethnicity ever to appear on a US ticket, after white and black (4th if you count Lieberman separately), isn't Indigenous, Latino, or Chinese.

Or that we have so many professors and CEOs and entertainment stars and suchlike. We love to pretend it's because we're special. When the game is sort of structurally rigged for us upper caste indians, with our 200 year history of pretending to be quasi-white.

When an American asks "How do you speak such good English?" it's tempting to get offended and talk about colonialism. But the real answer is, because I was taught by some of the best teachers, and my parents, grandparents, even a great grandparent were fluent in English.

There's a very very tiny percentage of Indians who can say that. And they're the ones most likely to easily move to the US and succeed. Or succeed and move to the US.