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Free State Project 93% Towards Goal (freestateproject.org)
Okian Warrior writes: Long term readers may recall the Free State Project, a plan to gather 20,000 liberty-minded participants and move to a low-populated state, as covered here on Slashdot. The project reached 90% of its 20,000 member goal last year with accelerated growth in recent months, and is on track to trigger the move to New Hampshire before year's end.
Let them spend a full winter in NH and we'll see just how many stick around.
Turnout for state-level races tends to be under 50%, and some of the population is too young to vote, so that 1.5% is probably gonna be a full 5% of the electorate. Assuming a) they all show up on election day, and b) they all (or at least a reasonably large proportion of them) vote the same way.
A 5% voting block is pretty important. It really helps that they are in a state where they won't be the only people going "live free or die," and that the state's legislature is so fucking huge. With a 400-member lower House, there's only 3k or so people per legislator, which means it's much easier to get in on the ground floor then it would be in Cali.
The problem these guys have is not gonna be that their plan is stupid, it's gonna be that getting a bunch of Libertarian internet activists to a) actually follow the fuck through and move to New Hampshire, b) show up to vote in boring off-years elections when nobody actually votes, and c) all vote the same fucking way even if both candidates disagree with them on some issue; is pretty much the definition of impossible. Especially c).
That said, I wish them luck. Whatever happens, this is a lot more productive then the internet activists typical routine of posting a rant, and then concluding that the process is rigged/corruption is rampant/the parties are Fascistic Nazi-lites/etc. when everything isn't fixed in an hour.
You misunderstand how statists work. "West Side Story" scared old people in the 60's so they wanted to ban switchblades. To be good bureaucrats they banned all knives capable of one-handed operation, including multitools that EMS uses. Some EMS medics accepted the risk of prosecution to be more effective at their jobs but now they don't have to. The legislator who ran this effort, Jenn Coffey, an EMS medic, was accused of political extremism by the statists for her efforts. As a long-time NH resident, I say bring on such "extremism".
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I predict they will initially struggle to get people who pledged to actually move. They should have got 10x as many as they need, figuring in a 90% reneg rate.
Then the people already living there get pissed off.
Then it turns out that the people who did move were mostly part of some sub group, like SJW men's rights activists or homophobes or something.
Eventually it ends up being as screwed up as anywhere else, just a different flavour. The glut of skills will cause employment problems, the sudden influx will cause infrastructure problems, and you will have a bunch of opinionated people who are motivated to vote trying to serve their own interests as they inevitably will.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't know what situation would really require a switchblade, either, but I think that's a poor reason to make them illegal. Needing to have a compelling reason for things to be legal is a shitty way to run a society. Things should only be made illegal if there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason to do so.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Well, you certainly illustrate the point that there are thoughtful libertarians out there. An interesting point on libertarianism along the lines of what you're saying... I once volunteer-taught a class on American politics for some adult ESL students. When I introduced "libertarian versus statist" as a dimension that is distinct from liberal and conservative, it was pretty new to most of them. That is, while almost all societies grapple with the how much control the state should exercise over various kinds of activities, it's only in the US that we have a name for that (Liberty!) and a group that (nominally) wants to minimize state control over everything. The US has a long lefty-libertarian tradition that has fueled many important social advances (freedom to love and marry whoever you please being the most recent example), while our righty-libertarians have also served to keep the US out of some of the worst excess of statist economics (think price controls).
That said, it's pretty hard to line up with libertarianism in it's current form. The three axiomatic views that most turn me off are
1. The private sector does everything better than the government does or might do
2. Everyone can always have everything if they only try hard enough
3. Social well-being can only be maximized by increasing individual well-being
What drives me nuts is how often these are asserted as axioms in spite of numerous and obvious counterexamples. Skepticism that government intervention will solve a problem is necessary, healthy, and frequently true. But there are so many readily available counterexamples that these cannot be axioms.
# 3 might be a little different than the others, and I'd actually be interested in a thoughtful libertarian critique of it. It is what Pope Francis calls "subsidiarity", the idea that humans actually gain meaning and satisfaction from feeling that they are subsidiary to something bigger than themselves. I'm no Catholic, but I see this in a lot of things. An individual who is free of all external obligations is a lonely, disconnected person, and I have a hard time believe that there are many people who are happier this way. Clearly there is such as thing as too much obligation to society, but what about too little?
A potent example of #1 is the lunatic response to Obamacare. This was an idea from 1970s "conservative" think tanks that was a pragmatic compromise right up until someone tried to implement it. And all told the ACA has a pretty non-statist system architecture: the state does not mandate what insurance you get, it does not mandate which company you choose it from (in fact there are standards to ensure a minimum of choice), it does not say what doctor you can or cannot go to ...you are always free (like Liberty, not beer) to go to a doctor that is not in your plan, and Obamacare makes that EASIER not harder.
The mandate components of the law (health insurers have to take anyone who wants insurance ---> everyone has to buy insurance) that elicit all this yelling about "state force" and "FBI marshalls frog-marching me" are just system architectures to deal with real and fundamental problems.
The business of insurance is to collect as many premium dollars as possible, and it's very, very easy for insurers to cheat without some rules (oh, you got cancer in the rain on Sunday... if you look in Appendix R20421.13 subsection 7 of your plan, you'll see that this is not covered). Likewise it's really easy for covered people to cheat without some rules (oh, I rode motorcycle without a helmet for 10 years and now I crashed and am paralyzed from the neck down... pay for all my healthcare). This is what happens in the real world, and we as engineers/technologists are the ones who stick our heads out and find a set of tradeoffs that makes things a little better. And we are also the ones who deal with the sucky parts of the architecture we chose. So I can't understand when this type of thinker can't relate to what Obamacare is about.