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."
Never mind. If you can't be bothered to, you know, actually educate yourself you are definitely not someone we'd want participating in a truly representative government. The link is right there in TFS, BTW.
It is easy to equate this with "News for Nerds" -- they are hacking a system while attempting to use the system against itself in order to bring about change. It is also a learning process. This is the epitome of what hackers and other creative people used to embody -- and what many of us should strive for now. Learn, grow, change (for the better, we hope) instead of just maintaining the status quo.
All it takes is one "domino" to fall the right way and systemic change is created - even if it takes years for that domino to fall. The things get exciting.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Indoctrination is not education. They often call it that though. Being told you have to submit to the state authority on all things is exactly what is wrong with our current system. IRS, NSA, DOJ scandals all presuppose power to the state.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I don't consider a system where the rich rule over the rest of us like unchecked gods to be very liberating (unless you're rich, of course--then it's pretty damned sweet).
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Yeah, but it's the same old libertarian-party bullshit wrapped up in a fake facade.
When libertarians use the word "liberty" they mean it a lot like when scientologists use the word "ethics" or a lot of their other word misappropriations and catchphrases.
It's always funny listening to them speak. The average libertarian screaming about how government is always evil, taxation is always theft, how no entity but the government could ever have an impact on the "liberty" of another person. You know what? I prefer a world where segregated lunch counters don't exist, where there's someone who has my back to say the MY money is just as good as anyone else's rather than some kkk asshat being able to tell me to move to some other city where my "kind" is tolerated. Libertarians are so hung up on eliminating government that they'd gleefully go back to the days where I could be pushed out of a store with a shotgun just for being the wrong skin color.
Fuck them and fuck their racist bullshit.
We have had unregulated markets before, this is not new. They have always resulting in absolute concentration of wealth at the cost of the liberty, health and safety of the common man.
Many of the problems we currently face as the plutocrats grow in power are a result of deregulation, pushed by people who foolishly think they will get more liberty when in reality it just means that the powerful have more license to infringe on your liberty.
I've seen your argument a thousand times, and it just keeps getting more idiotic every time I see it.
No, definitely not, and that's why making voting compulsory is such a bad idea. The point of democracy is to widen the number of people making decisions to reduce the risk of things being missed. It's not to ensure that people, no matter how ignorant, can have a say in governance. That's just an unfortunate byproduct of not being able to decide who is and is not qualified to vote without the risk of screening out people that simply disagree.
If you're too lazy to inform yourself, you shouldn't be voting. People are going to cast votes that aren't for the best, the point of voting is to limit the influence that a small number of people making mistakes has on the governance of the region.
Do you respect the right to live? Do you believe that society has the right to determine who lives and dies arbitrarily, even if they are innocent of any crime? A social safety net helps those who have been temporarily or permanently rendered helpless through economic or other action to preserve their right to live.
Only a plutocrat or their loyal slave would prefer the right to pay lower taxes more than the right for the disenfranchised to live.
The real problem with the capital-L sort of libertarianism is that frankly, we're not good enough to make it work. Much like communism, you essentially set up a system that's almost trivial to game, and then you ask people not to game it. Recorded history has shown all too clearly what humanity is in the dark: not enough people will uphold the system to be able to support the system.
You could do it in a culture with an absolutely ironclad notion of honor that was so all-pervasive and agreed upon that the people followed it instinctively. In the West nowadays, we actually see such cultures -either from our own histories or from elsewhere entirely- as exotic: we're that far removed from where we'd need to be for a libertarian system to work. But even in these cultures, honor is almost always confined to the warrior classes: finding a culture that actually practices it throughout borders on impossibility. And when you find these, the underlying philosophies don't even claim to be libertarian in nature.
Honestly, this is where libertarians really need to be spending their time. Their goal is a good one to strive for, but the culture simply is not ready. The real work right now is preparing the culture, and as much as political parties would love to think otherwise, you cannot do this from the top down. You have to work from the bottom up: learn how to produce honorable people in an honorless world, then get out into the dialogue and spread the memes. This is slow, but it's the only way cultural change has ever really worked.
And yeah, this means we're unlikely to see a true libertarian system in our lifetime. That's a shame, but honestly, it doesn't really change the odds. Plunk the modern populace down into a libertarian system, and you'll only wind up with Thunderdome. You've got to fix the people before you can fix the system.
Do you respect the right to live?
Yes, but you should not have a right to anyones labor in order for you to live.
As soon as you decide that you have the right to someones labor, thats called slavery.
"His name was James Damore."
There is a real reason for States rights. One of the things a State can not do is to prevent you from leaving that State for another.
Bad States get left behind and change or die. Good States are rewarded. When you give all power to the Federal government there is only become an exparitate or suffer.
California is doing a bunch of stupid stuff right now. People are moving in droves out. California is going to be hurt further as the average income of its residence goes down and the tax burden upon them climbs.
The rights you so easily give up for convenience will cost you much more in the end. I know you can not be convinced.
People like you can only see the harm when directly impacts you. As long as you can go about your daily life un hindered there is no need to think deeply about what is really going on.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I'm a libertarian and Free State Project early mover.
The few friends I have who go to Tea Party events do so while holding their nose for the sole purpose of hopefully spotting/recruiting the 3% of them who have actual potential for rationalism.
I don't know why you equate libertarian with Tea Party. So many of the comments in this thread are tragically ignorant and insulting.
This is the same argument that has been going on for 400 years: collectivism vs. individual rights. (...) when rights of the collective are elevated above the rights of individuals, there are no barriers to tyranny
If either side "won" it'd be bizarre. Say one individual wants to listen to very loud music at 3 AM and the collective neighborhood wants him to stop, then what? It'd be crazy if society couldn't make any rules because individual rights trumps all and it'd be crazy if society could make any rules because collective rights trumps all. Society can have the democratic consent of the governed, but it can never have the individual consent of every person in every matter, so if you didn't vote for the government that passed the law should the law still apply to you? You never consented to it, there aren't any more free territories and for the sake of argument we can assume all other nations on earth would bar your emigration there. Society does force its will on the individual, if you don't agree with that right then there's no basis for democracy or society in general.
Natural rights - if they exist, after all these are all figments of human imagination and don't exist by any law of nature - are the exception to that, individual rights that society can't take away. Or rather I should say they actually can take away, but that they morally and ethically shouldn't be able to take away. Note that you can reshape many rights as both positive and negative, for example if we agree that society can order you to not do something like play loud music at 3 AM can't they then then order you to not earn any income without paying taxes on it? There's a reason this discussion has been going on for hundreds of years and I really doubt we'll settle it tonight unless we get totally hammered, unfortunately then we won't remember the solution in the morning.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings