Have you ever lived anywhere else besides where you live now?

[Pat Mustard]

<snipping for brevity's sake>

First of all I'm going to point out that on most substantive issues there's only a hairs breadth difference between liberalism and modern conservatism. They both massively prioritise the rights of the capitalist and land owning* few over the great mass of the people, it is only around the edges of social issues where they diverge.

As a man who is on the leftwards edge of social democracy (I'd be an out and out socialist only for I don't think humanity is yet able to set a system comparable to the end goal of socialist) I see little difference in the larger scheme of things between the two.

To answer the question in the title though (at first I thought the question was more literal than it is, asking people if they physically lived elsewhere), I was right wing as a teen and young adult. I thought low taxes on the rich was a good thing, as it'd allow them to create wealth for the rest of us, I thought regulation of private business was wrong and so on.

What changed me was dropping out of uni first of all, where I had to take a series of minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, and realising how hard people had to work to get a bare minimum existence^ (and yes I know it's worse in America or anywhere in the third world, but minimum wage jobs in Ireland can still be pretty shitty), and most especially a group project I was working on when I returned to uni, where I had gotten the group to back my plan to argue for a flat tax as a way of helping Ireland's economy. When I first heard of it I was all for it, gung ho to an extreme extent, but then I started looking into the idea and countries which had adopted it, and my view of the world quickly collapsed. I was now confronted with an evidential and theoretical basis which showed that my political and economic views were the opposite of what I needed to be arguing for to secure a better country for me and the majority of my fellow citizens.

*I'm not talking about the farmer who owns 50 acres here, nor the family with a big mortgage for a small house.

^This had been staring me in the face for literally yonks, but at five and six you don't see your parents struggling and sacrificing to make ends meet.

Oh and to regards the moving bit, going from a small village at the edge of Limerick (20 miles Irish) to Limerick itself, to Cork, back to the village, is not big in distance terms, but frankly was huge in terms of culture.