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.
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.
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