Realizing and actually grokking the fact that a free market (in a general sense) is a distributed computer that performs a computation that no other machine can do.

It takes the BUY and SELL signals from each and every participant (billions of "nodes"!) and turns them into this magical single number per commodity that we call price.

In that moment, I realized the fallacy of all socialist thought, of all regulation, and especially of these handful of men sitting in central bank conference rooms deciding how to best use their ~12 brains in order to work better than the BILLIONS that are used in an unregulated system.

That was the day I stopped being a liberal and became a libertarian.