Slashdot Mirror
The Free State Project, One Decade Later
Okian Warrior writes "About a decade ago Slashdot ran an article about the Free State Project: an attempt to get 20,000 liberty-minded activists to move to one state (they chose NH) and change the political landscape. Eleven years on, the project is still growing and having an effect on statewide politics. NPR recently ran a program discussing the movement, its list of successes, and plans for the future. The FSP has a noticeable effect on politics right now — still 6,000 short of their 20,000 goal, and long before the members are scheduled to move to NH."
I don't know what these people are trying to prove. We know communism doesn't work, because we've tried it in eastern Europe. We also know that libertarism doesn't work, because take any failed African state and you see that people don't self organize into well-functioning society.
Besides, I really despise these smug libertarians, who thump their chests about liberty and privacy and are not even remotely aware how much they got from this society, not to mention they they are not willing to give any of it back in taxes... Big egos, little brain and compassion.
That's your opinion. But find me another powerful country on Earth where there's only two parties to vote for.
And in the USA it's even funnier because the two parties are 95% similar in their ideals, both heavily slanted to the right.
Looks more like it was high home prices in California moving people out.
In contrast, just slightly more people with household incomes in the $100,000-$200,000 range left than came to California (103 out per 100 in), and California actually gained a hair more people in the $200,000+ range than it lost (99 out per 100 in). The rich aren’t leaving California, but the poor and the middle class are.
As for the rest of your little screed, most of those supposed "rights you so easily give up for convenience" that you go on about, if you're going to argue what I think you're about to argue (you left it delightfully, koolaid-drinker level vague there), aren't worth half as much to me as the REAL rights of liberty: the right to vote, the right to participate in society as an equal, the right not to have some asshole decide they think I'm gay even if I'm not and fire me with that justification or fire me "just because I can, fuck you it's an at-will employment state."
The dirty secret of libertarianism has always been that it's about protecting the rights of the rich over the rights of the poor.
The people changed. That is the reason racism mostly went away.
In Texas, a group of jurors just let a man off for shooting a woman over $150, claiming he was recovering his "property" since he hired an escort and she told him sex wasn't part of the deal.
East Texas still has sundown towns. Mississippi and Alabama are still worse.
Government attempting to fix racial injustice against the black community has resulted in the destruction of the black family unit.
Good lord, do you listen to yourself? The problems of destruction of the black family unit have been mostly due to the drug war, which uncoincidentally was started by conservative racists.
Remember this famous quote?
"Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice."
But don't worry. You say it's "social policies" to help poor families stay together tearing them apart, and not the racist republican drug war goal taking of a majority of their population at young age, sticking them in prisons, giving them no access to education, no access to legal counsel, and then shoveling them back out into the population at age 30 with no job prospects, no trained skills and a big red "don't hire me" stamp on their foreheads in the form of a felony conviction record.