And what it shows us about the many ways to a belief in liberty.

Reason, on its Hit and Run site, posted an excellent 8-minute interview with Joshua Childress, who resigned as a Border Patrol agent because he no longer believed in the mission.

Actually quitting a job because it violates your principles is heroic in itself.

But what I also found interesting is how he came to his principles. Listening to historian Thaddeus Russell’s interviews at Unregistered helped him changed his beliefs. At about the 3:25 point, the interviewer, Zach Weissmueller and he mention an interview with a prostitute named Maggie McNeill as being an important turning point. Interestingly, it didn’t seem to be directly because he decided that prostitution should be legal; it was more that he found her to be an interesting and compelling person. Once he started thinking about this, he started to “take stock” of the rest of his life. Many of his other views unravelled. One of them was on immigration. He positively quotes co-blogger Bryan Caplan’s views on immigration.

I’ve always found interesting how people come to their views, whether on liberty or on anything else, but especially on liberty. Sometimes it’s something they read—that’s the typical case I’ve seen. Other times it’s a nasty run in with a government official. In my case, it was Ayn Rand who got me thinking about everything. But I’ve talked to people over the years about how the minimum wage prices some of the most vulnerable workers out of jobs and have seen that that one insight, once they get it, causes them to question other views. Specifically, they start to question how benevolent the government is. They might not go full David Henderson or Joshua Childress, but they do air out other views for questioning.

Here’s Thaddeus Russell’s long interview with Childress. I haven’t listened to it and so I can neither recommend for or against.