TL;DR: A lot of us started conservative and stopped being conservative. Here's one story.

In my case, I got into reddit and especially the libertarian areas. The first real philosophical issue that bugged the shit out of me was intellectual property. Because the usual theory around property rights was based around scarcity. But a good idea is by definition scarce only before it is discovered; afterwards, the only way for it to remain scarce is for its discoverers to keep it to themselves (assuming it isn't discovered independently by others). In the libertarian community, there was a lot of debate over whether intellectual property was "real" or not.

It seemed pretty obvious to me that my own mind could be my property, but that an idea was not the same thing, since ideas are not scarce and jump minds rapidly. Therefore, patents and copyrights are an over-extension of the idea of property. But at the same time, capitalism very clearly incentivizes firms not to take big risks developing technology, and instead to take advantage of the idea after someone else discovers it. Thus, at least in an otherwise "free" market, there is a social incentive to reward people for inventing things.

Thus, a pragmatic rationale for any policy becomes more important than its theoretical consistency with a particular moral system. What do you want to accomplish? Do your policies actually accomplish it vs. other policies?

Once it becomes apparent that there is a conflict between public and private interest, and that a "free market" economy (and therefore government) is inevitably dominated by wealthy private interests, the question simply becomes how best to wrest control from those private interests. So far, only a socialist revolution seems to have any hope of accomplishing that.