The Day I Became a Conservative

Summer 1996

I entered my adolescence as a Republican on the merit of my parents having been on that team. The nonthinking acceptance continued until one day in the summer of 1996 when I became a Conservative under my own volition, my own conscious choice.


My job entailed much driving and I’d recently become burned out listening to music, I needed a break. Acting on a recommendation from a colleague with whom I worked, I tried talk radio. On this sunny summer morning driving around Southern California there had been a discussion about a bill President Clinton signed. The bill provided a segment of the population with free phone service. My initial thought was, ‘That’s OK with me. The phone company can afford to give it away to a few folks.’

I naively figured the phone company would carry the burden of being required to furnish the free service. But the discussion continued that this was not the way it worked out. The radio host insisted that the phone company passed those lost service charges forward to the paying customers by simply adding a fee. ‘No way,’ I thought to myself. ‘There’s no charge back. This guy is a wind bag.’

My next phone bill arrived and I scrutinized the thing. There it was, the fee! The guy on the radio may be a bag of wind, but I was indeed paying for someone else to have the same service that I paid for. ‘This sucks!,’ was my prevailing amended sentiment. My naiveté was rendered a powerful blow. I was a singe fella renting a 500 square foot hovel in a 40-unit apartment complex in Pasadena at the time. Why was I paying for other peoples’ goods when I had few things of my own?


Turns out nothing is free, especially if the government says it is. Free, in government parlance, just means that the folks receiving the service or benefit aren’t paying but everyone else is.

To look at it another way, let’s consider milk shakes. I’m a guy who is very fond of milk shakes and am wildly in favor of them being available to the populace. Yet, I have no interest in being required to pay for someone else’s milk shake. Those who desire this wonderful concoction should be prepared to either pay for it or pass it up.

Certainly phone service is more important than milk shakes. [Note: This even holds true while we’re within grasp of McDonald’s seasonal Shamrock Shakes.] But the point is that the Government, both Federal and state, are much more generous with give-aways than I prefer.

While the ‘Free Phone Service’ discussion may have some merit, the scenario just brought the reasoning home for me. And so it came to be that my politics turned away from the language of enablers and took a large step toward self-reliance.
-klem