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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 They managed to get the law banning switchblades repealed.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.
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.