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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.
I've been following their progress from the beginning, and they're already having an effect on local politics.
A number of free staters are already a member of the NH house. They managed to get the law banning switchblades repealed. This made sense, because virtually no one gets injured by switchblades, and there's lots of situations where being able to open a knife one-handed is really useful (such as EMS and rock climbing).
They were just shy of legalizing marijuana in the last round (2 votes short of an override of the Governor's veto), they made it legal to inform juries of their right to nullification, and they've reduced the budget.
(On jury nullification: at least one person was acquitted on cannibus charges by unanimous jury vote.)
All in all, they're really having an effect. I can't wait to see what happens when the entire 20,000 get here.
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.
"Liberty Minded" is US code word for "white male who own guns".
Drug laws are disproportionately directed at blacks. Commercial sex laws are almost exclusively directed at women. Libertarians want to repeal both.
You are a libertarian. You just don't like other libertarians. I don't really like other libertarians for the same sorts of reasons you probably don't. Or maybe you aren't a libertarian. It's just a meaningless label that's been co-opted by the republican party anyway.
In any case there is no reason you can't support a social welfare system and be a libertarian. Libertarians aren't anarchists (or at least they shouldn't be). Libertarians should believe in government doing the jobs that government can do better than the private sector, and libertarians are free to disagree on which jobs those are.
There are plenty of stupid shitty selfish libertarians, and there are plenty of compassionate and thoughtful libertarians, just like every other political persuasion. Although it seems as though lately many of the libertarians I can actually relate to, have started to shy away from that label as it has recently become rather toxic.
In any case, all I want to point out is that "libertarian" is a very broad philosophy that encompasses more than just the dickhead republicans who are the loudest self proclaimed libertarians at the moment. Although I would argue that you aren't a real libertarian if you don't support liberty for people outside your own demographic (e.g. gays, women, minorities, muslims, atheists, recreational drug users, polygamists, etc). It's easy to support liberty for yourself.
I guess they've given up on artificial islands and seasteading as a pipe dream that they're not going to be able to achieve. It's straight out of the so-called stages of grief - denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and move to New Hampshire.
Shiny New Australia.
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
They are simply newcomers, who want to impose their views on people. And, of course, isn't there something contradictory in trying to impose "Freedom" on anybody?
Anarchists and Libertarians typically don't care how others live their lives as long as you don't use coercion, violence, kidnapping , and torture against them to go along with your agenda. People should have a right to voluntarily be enslaved and a right to live under their ideals because you own the effects of your body and it isn't our right to impose upon you our ideals through coercion. This means that we are perfectly happy to live and even cooperate with communists , socialists, democrats and republicans as long as they don't impose their agenda upon us. Where it gets complicated is when statists feel bitter about some people stepping outside of the "social contract" that we never agreed to in the first place and not shouldering some public burden along with them. Since anarchists aren't necessarily against governments but state governments I believe a truce can be brokered between the communities where anarchist collectives pay for the public services they do use, and can refuse to pay for the ones they disagree with (murdering innocent families with drone bombs 90% of incidents and NSA surveillance used to murder those people)
This is a response to, "If you don't like it, move." Okay, they did. And NH is close enough to their goals that it won't be a major policy change.
I like the idea of having an honest community standard, where people generally have the same principles. Being comfortable because you grew up somewhere is the worst kind of community. Because you may like your house and neighborhood, but disagree with the neighbors.
One that runs out nonconformants will sort itself out. And I would like to see communities with such strong identities that up to the state level people generally agree.
Since the target is a low population area, I don't see a problem.
Give me liberty or death, because I can't be arsed to move a few hundred miles?
1. it is a small state, with about 1.3 million residents
2. it is a rich state, #6 on per-capita income and household income
3. there are jobs to be had, the state has a favorable economic climate
4. there's a lot to do, mountains, lakes, the ocean.
5. no sales tax, no income tax (OTOH property taxes are very high)
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
New Hampshire, has always been a strongly libertarian leaning state for the northeast, especially New England area. Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire along with Oregon were often referred to as the left libertarian states. As in it tended to be "socially liberal" and "libertarian".
So basically New Hampshire, seemed to be one of those locations where it'd be most easy to say "I support your right to gay marriage, guns, and ganja". It's also a very beautiful rustic state.
Heck, when ALL their license plates exclaim "LIVE FREE OR DIE", of course it's going to be one of the top choice of people who want to live freely.
http://www.plateshack.com/y2k/...
Base principle of effective government right there.
Complexity is the enemy of reliability, and when laws are most numerous, the state is most corrupt (with sincere apologies to Alan Robertson, Tacitus, and Sun Tzu).
The Georgists who moved to Arden, Delaware with the same basic idea as the Free Staters (that is, to go to a small state where their ideas would have more impact on society) had a long-term positive effect on the area, reaching even beyond Delaware's borders. People who are willing to pull up roots and work in order to achieve their ideas - people who are willing to strive towards their goals - sometimes build vibrant, dynamic and productive communities... although not always, as the ruins of Salubria and Icaria attest.
Um, no. There is actually a great deal of libertarian thought given to the most effective compromises that can be made since not everyone is on-board with ubermen-against the-world archetype that seems to be in vogue now. In fact, New Hampshire already fits within the geolibertarian model (no sales or income tax, high property tax), which is an anathema to the "taxation is theft" crowd. You can't even set up your corporate structure in the Cayman islands to be rid of it.
Hayek and Friedman already championed the ideas behind basic income as the least destructive way to have social services, and curiously is now being championed by the left. And then there is that whole other left-libertarianism as well.
There has been very considered thought on how to move society in a more libertarian direction without letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The hardline libertarian types are simply ignorant beyond sloganeering, which is a shame really. Libertarianism has some rather nuanced insights beyond "government is bad, m'kay".
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.
At first, when I saw this, I thought to myself, "Huh, secessionists? Didn't Utah try that some years back, and got smacked down hard by the Fed for it?" But then I took a look at what they're doing and realized that they may be geniuses, assuming they keep things on track: They're working from within the system to change the system, which, by the way, is the way the United States is supposed to work in the first place. They're just going about it in a different way than we're used to seeing, and they're doing it one State at a time, starting with New Hampshire. I'd say that the biggest roadblock they'll come up against is their own people, because as I like to say, "The best way to ruin a good thing is to get a bunch of people involved with it"; if they can't keep an entire State full of people on track with their original concept, then it'll fall apart and become a gigantic mess. Will be interesting to see how this works out for them and I'll be watching. Something like this might just turn the entire Country from some of the bad directions it's going.
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