Absolutely love this: "Once you grow up, however, you realise that taking care of yourself isn't all that difficult, and big government just gets in the way." And I agree that the peddlers of the nonsense/evil are the actual villains.
As for being leftist at 20, I think my socialist phase was in 3rd or 4th grade. It's because I had mutant reading skills at a very early age and grew up in a house full of books with a granny who could quote Shakespeare and Cicero and who said "The world doesn't owe you a living" almost daily.