Welcome to McFloogle.  As Slappy has already said, the idea for this blog was born from countless texts, emails, and hours of conversation about economics, politics, religion, and everything else.  Independently from one another, we got the idea that we should begin to write down these conversations so that we could share them with other people for critiquing and convincing.

And like Slappy did, let me give some background on myself as well.

I grew up in a middle class suburban family.  My entire education, grade school, high school, and college, was through Catholic schools.  I have a degree in mechanical engineering and have been working in the field for two years, dealing mostly with the nuclear and pharmaceutical industries.  I grew up playing sports and music, which I still do today.  But I also had an interest in politics.  Now, of course not many 14 year olds have any idea what they’re actually talking about regarding politics.  But what were my thoughts on politics and economics back then?  Let’s just say that I cringe when I think about the things I used to say.

As I got older, I was able to grasp reality a little better to the point where economics became an actual interest.  In my senior year of college, I had an open class slot, so I decided to take a course in macroeconomics.  Even though I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on in the class, it gave me a basis for a technical understanding of economics that would be important as went deeper into the subject on my own.  I developed opinions and debated people and I often found that I had no answer for their criticisms of my views.  Fortunately, I kept all of this in the back of my head and it would often bother me that I had no response.

One day, I had the most important thought that I’ve ever had to this point in my life.  It was this: sometimes I’m wrong.

Being just a little bit honest with myself allowed me to look at the contradicting beliefs that I held and say “There’s clearly something wrong with me here.”  I slowly worked my way through my beliefs and ideologies and lined them up against each other.  If they fit together, I was alright…for now.  If not, then I was going to have to dig deeper.  I questioned everything.  Maybe it was the engineer in me, but I wanted to have a simple rule or law from which everything else flowed.  Instead of assembling my beliefs from various sources from who knows where, using that singular philosophy would at least make me consistent.

I became fascinated with how and why people, economies, businesses, and societies functioned the way they did.  I actually started reading.  Topics and ideas that seemed so foreign and difficult for me to understand finally made sense.

And so here I am now.  I don’t claim that my ideas would bring about utopia.  There is no such thing as utopia.  My goal is to move society to its most moral and just form.  I’ll admit to being an ideologue, but if you can find a hole in my logic, please call me out on it.  Maybe I was wrong.  Maybe I was right.  But let’s just be open and honest about it so that we can all move closer to truth.

Truth would be our ultimate achievement.

Rollo McFloogle