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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.
WTF does that even mean? That could be anything from Libertarians who don't want to pay taxes to hippies wanting to set up a socialist utopia.
Liberty means that both of those groups should be able to do those things that they want, short of hurting others.
I'm a long-time NH resident, and have met several of the FSP early movers. That pretty well fits each one of them - let people do what they want, short of hurting others (oh, the horror). They're almost all strong on property rights (except for the odd Georgist or two) and favor peace and tolerance as the prevailing basis for society. Most favor sound money and work hard for private charity. There are already a few that live in something like a commune and the ones that are pro-markets and free enterprise are completely down with that - they think it's silly, but the commune-ists pose no threat to them.
It's probably a safe bet that none favor Greek-style central control, central banking, and a pervasive regulatory environment, or the US-style warfare/welfare state (corporate welfare being tops among them). Their statement of intent says, "the maximum role of civil government is the protection of life, liberty, and property."
I've worked with some of them at the State house on issues like the right to record public officials in their official duty, the prosecution of victimless crimes, and legalizing industrial hemp. The Earth is "full" as there are no unclaimed jurisdictions, so the new reality of the past century is that one cannot simply move to settle a new area with like-minded friends (e.g. Utah) - the only option left is to move en masse and gentrify an existing area.
It's certainly not for everybody - those who would rather be kept as pets should not move here, and that's the beauty of political migration - those who do wish to "Live Free or Die" can move here with the FSP and work to make this one beautiful spot of nine-thousand square miles the freest place on Earth.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
AS there are no JOBS in NH... From the beginning this "project" screamed, "for rich people only" because those are the only ones that can just uproot their lives and move without having to have a job.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The state is not the enemy of liberty (or more accurately, it does not have to be, and should not be).
Your liberty can be infringed by the action of any powerful entity, be it the state, a large corporation, a wealthy person or a simple thug.
The role of the state should be to protect your liberties, not just in theory but in practice. And that means regulating markets, providing a social safety net and providing a framework of laws that protect workers from abuse.
I agree with basic libertarian principals. Where you fail is economics. Despite popular belief, Adam Smith was not an advocate of the unregulated market. He wrote it as an overly simplified and imperfect model, nothing more. He also wrote extensively on its risks and limitations, which libertarians completely ignore in an irrational quest for dogmatic purity.
They chose my home town as the test bed.
The hippies chose the city of San Francisco here in California and now it's one of the most liberal cities in the United States. The hippies left the conservative communities around the country from which they originated, and where they weren't accepted and couldn't change things politically, to move to an area where they were accepted and could vote to change things. The Free Staters are just a better organized and more intentional effort to do the same.
They attempted to stack the select board with their members using unscrupulous means such as slander stuffing mailboxes without stamps in violation of federal rules.
The lefties here in California have done that and more in pursuit of getting what they want politically and now they run this state. So that's actually pretty tame by California standards.
There is some good as they oppose wind development which largely benefits out of state interests and decimates local ridgetops. As a group they seem like nice folks, kind of like right wing hippies ; )
One thing that you can count on with Libertarian types is that they won't be a drain on local social services. New Hampshire could do a lot worse than attracting a bunch of people who want to work hard and be self sufficient.
However they are subverting the will of the public by attempting to hijack local and state politics and a similar bunch has devastated the legislature at the state level and made many questionable laws in defiance of the majority of the electorate.
They are the public. They moved there, remember? Elections have consequences, as the left is fond of saying, and in this case their strategy of moving to an area to concentrate their votes appears to be working. You may not like the results, but coordinating your move with like minded people isn't illegal and it's the right of every American to live in wherever they choose to and are able to. The states cannot deny any American citizen the right to become a resident if they want to live there and freedom of association is protected in the First Amendment of our Constitution, right up there with speech.
The first time the FSP was on /. I was tempted. The second time the FSP was on /. I signed up.
Now I've lived here for five years. This is the real deal, NH has the perfect state and local government for this experiment. Politics is the unofficial state sport of NH with 400 state reps for only 1.3 million constituents that are about equally divided between the two major parties. Republican and democratic parties engage our ideas, sometimes in battle, other times in courtship. You don't have to explain first principles over and over again, everyone here knows government like fire can be a dangerous master, you get to have debate and make an impact on people and policy with all that stuff as accepted framework of the discussion.
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
Probably because you're an idiot. Read up on the economic situation in the US at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century if you want to see why Libertarianism is doomed to failure. Either by destroying the things that made America great or just fizzling out when there's no longer a supply of idiots to buy into it.
We used to have what the Libertarians want, and we no longer have it because it sucked.
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.
No, Hayek was an individualist, who thought a functioning state was necessary specifically to oppose collectivism. In the absence of a functioning state, the only feasible option is tribalism: people must band together for protection against roving bands of thieves, and to have any hope of contracts being enforced or anything else you expect in a functioning society.
Hayek, as an individualist, thought the basics of a functioning society should be available to any individual without a tribalist system of providing them. Hence, he believed a state should exist that can do some basic things: 1) defend the nation against outside threats; 2) provide police that make sure there are not roving bands of thieves, rapists, and murderers; 3) operate hospitals; 4) enforce commercial contracts; and 5) provide a minimum level of subsistence income as a safety net.
Those are all functions that are required for a society, and in the absence of a state guaranteeing them to all individuals, the void will be filled by collectivist, tribalist groupings such as extended-family clans, ethnic groups, churches, cults, and the like.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And would you want to go to a business who doesn't like who you are and is willing to deny you the ability to give them money?
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to be on the other end of that, but as much as I hated it, I wouldn't want the government to be able to force people to think in a certain way, because if the situation was different, the government could be used to make *me* think a different way or punish me if I didn't.
Let's just put some KKK tags around your statement:
"And if that means treading on the "right of association" of a thousand [faggots/niggers/wetbacks], I'm perfectly ok with that, because there are more important rights at stake."
You'd be giving those guys that exact same power, it would just be a matter of time before they got it. Sooner or later, as much good as you thought you would do with that, it would all be undone.
Obviously, certain public health situations need to respect legal documents like Power of Attorney. If they are not, then there should be recourse in law for that. Any libertarian should be behind your right as an individual to make contracts and delegate your own authority as required. If someone says that they are a "libertarian", but doesn't believe that, then there is something inconsistent about them.
And look at it this way, even if you thought being gay was wrong, in theory I should be able to make out a Power of Attorney to a third party, and that party could be, and often will be, the same sex as me. Accepting Powers of Attorney isn't about gay rights, it's about people who are ignorant of the law. If they were ignorant of the law in that way, I'd support you in any lawsuit you made to get that rectified. They don't have the right to override legally binding agreements like that.
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