The Free State Project, One Decade Later 701
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."
"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 loving? (Score:2, Insightful)
These are libertarians, While they do support many liberties, they utterly fail on economic concepts, and are looking to negate liberty through plutocracy via corporate proxy.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:2, Insightful)
According to the project page, it means people wo wish to take responsibility for themselves, rather than have the government run their lives.
While get your point that liberty-minded by itself isn't very specific, one thing it can't mean socialist. From Merriam-Webster:
Socialism: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
Liberty: the quality or state of being free
Obviously if everything is owned and controlled by the government, that's not freedom, liberty. Government control (socialism) is the precise opposite of liberty (control of your own life).
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is easy to equate this with "News for Nerds" -- they are hacking a system while attempting to use the system against itself in order to bring about change. It is also a learning process. This is the epitome of what hackers and other creative people used to embody -- and what many of us should strive for now. Learn, grow, change (for the better, we hope) instead of just maintaining the status quo.
All it takes is one "domino" to fall the right way and systemic change is created - even if it takes years for that domino to fall. The things get exciting.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indoctrination is not education. They often call it that though. Being told you have to submit to the state authority on all things is exactly what is wrong with our current system. IRS, NSA, DOJ scandals all presuppose power to the state.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't consider a system where the rich rule over the rest of us like unchecked gods to be very liberating (unless you're rich, of course--then it's pretty damned sweet).
Re:I am not from USA (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but it's the same old libertarian-party bullshit wrapped up in a fake facade.
When libertarians use the word "liberty" they mean it a lot like when scientologists use the word "ethics" or a lot of their other word misappropriations [xenu-directory.net] and catchphrases.
It's always funny listening to them speak. The average libertarian screaming about how government is always evil, taxation is always theft, how no entity but the government could ever have an impact on the "liberty" of another person. You know what? I prefer a world where segregated lunch counters don't exist, where there's someone who has my back to say the MY money is just as good as anyone else's rather than some kkk asshat being able to tell me to move to some other city where my "kind" is tolerated. Libertarians are so hung up on eliminating government that they'd gleefully go back to the days where I could be pushed out of a store with a shotgun just for being the wrong skin color.
Fuck them and fuck their racist bullshit [ronpaul.com].
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:4, Insightful)
The economic aspect of modern libertarianism will inevitably leads to fascism.
Absolute economic "freedom" grants absolute economic license of the plutocrats to control every aspect of life for the people.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are currently claiming that a totally different economic system from what we have now will inevitably lead to the economic system we have now.
I've seen your argument a thousand times, and it just keeps getting more idiotic every time I see it.
Re:I am not from USA (Score:4, Insightful)
don't even think about forming a Union, Liberty!
Libertarianism (Latin: liber, "free")[1] is a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end.[2][3] This includes emphasis on the primacy of individual liberty,[4][5] political freedom, and voluntary association. A voluntary association or union (also sometimes called a voluntary organization, unincorporated association, common-interest association,[1]:266 or just an association) is a group of individuals who enter into an agreement as volunteers to form a body (or organization) to accomplish a purpose.
Sounds like Unions are fine so long as they are voluntary.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:5, Insightful)
We have had unregulated markets before, this is not new. They have always resulting in absolute concentration of wealth at the cost of the liberty, health and safety of the common man.
Many of the problems we currently face as the plutocrats grow in power are a result of deregulation, pushed by people who foolishly think they will get more liberty when in reality it just means that the powerful have more license to infringe on your liberty.
I've seen your argument a thousand times, and it just keeps getting more idiotic every time I see it.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:2, Insightful)
You Americans are so wrapped-up in your two-party system that you can't even argue correctly anymore.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, definitely not, and that's why making voting compulsory is such a bad idea. The point of democracy is to widen the number of people making decisions to reduce the risk of things being missed. It's not to ensure that people, no matter how ignorant, can have a say in governance. That's just an unfortunate byproduct of not being able to decide who is and is not qualified to vote without the risk of screening out people that simply disagree.
If you're too lazy to inform yourself, you shouldn't be voting. People are going to cast votes that aren't for the best, the point of voting is to limit the influence that a small number of people making mistakes has on the governance of the region.
Re:The Free Staters chose my town as the test bed (Score:4, Insightful)
"stuffing mailboxes without stamps in violation of federal rules."
OMG!
Ironic how most people in the USA say they support "democracy", but when a group of people (with whom they disagree) decide to engage in political activism, those people are accused of "hijacking" politics and "subverting" the process.
Are they engaged in actively suppressing the majority? Election fraud? Voter intimidation?
If the majority of "the public" refuses to participate in politics, then why should the "will of the public" matter? If "the public" doesn't like it, what's preventing them from employing the exact same techniques that the FSP activists are using?
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you respect the right to live? Do you believe that society has the right to determine who lives and dies arbitrarily, even if they are innocent of any crime? A social safety net helps those who have been temporarily or permanently rendered helpless through economic or other action to preserve their right to live.
Only a plutocrat or their loyal slave would prefer the right to pay lower taxes more than the right for the disenfranchised to live.
Wrong place for this sort of thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you respect the right to live?
Yes, but you should not have a right to anyones labor in order for you to live.
As soon as you decide that you have the right to someones labor, thats called slavery.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a real reason for States rights. One of the things a State can not do is to prevent you from leaving that State for another.
Bad States get left behind and change or die. Good States are rewarded. When you give all power to the Federal government there is only become an exparitate or suffer.
California is doing a bunch of stupid stuff right now. People are moving in droves out. California is going to be hurt further as the average income of its residence goes down and the tax burden upon them climbs.
The rights you so easily give up for convenience will cost you much more in the end. I know you can not be convinced.
People like you can only see the harm when directly impacts you. As long as you can go about your daily life un hindered there is no need to think deeply about what is really going on.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:2, Insightful)
You Americans are so wrapped-up in your two-party system that you can't even argue correctly anymore.
Any time an argument starts with "You $ETHNICORCULTURALGROUP" anything written subsequently loses all merit immediately.
"You Jews are so wrapped-up in your two-party system that you can't even argue correctly anymore.
Doesn't seem so innocent now that the generic term used to apply to a mass group of people isn't one that has been deemed OK to bundle together now does it?
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Again. The people changed. That is the reason racism mostly went away. It had nothing to do with Government laws. The laws are useless at best and harmful in many cases.
The more federal protection a group gets the worse off it becomes later.
Government attempting to fix racial injustice against the black community has resulted in the destruction of the black family unit.
This has done a massive amount of damage to their community. Damage that will take generations to fix.
But you go ahead and feel good about it. After all you are helping. Right?
Re:Taxation wrong? Sorry, don't get it. Foreign. (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not suggesting that taxation is used to make payouts. The point is that liberty is about freedom, and freedom is founded on rights. Those rights are where all liberty starts. The right not to be hungry. The right to healthcare. The right to education. The right to vote. The right to work. The right to warmth, clothing and shelter. The right to be protected and looked after when you are flooded, your home destroyed, or your land invaded, or you or your family merely get old, or sick. The more fundamental rights a nation is able to give it's population, the better that nation is, but some of those come at a price, which is taxation. In my mind at least, rights take precedence over freedom. The right not to be harmed takes precedence over the freedom to harm. A huge amount of rights vs. freedom is about the ability to give consent, which requires the asking of it. Maybe if your friend had asked for consent, he wouldn't have ended up involved in the interlocution you describe.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you found a couple of people who were pieces of shit that happened to be also attending a "Tea Party" rally. It should be pointed out that most of those gatherings were open to anybody willing to listen, and that included nut jobs, communists, professional agitators who didn't give a damn about freedom, liberal wannabes who were openly trying to paint the rally as something it wasn't, and a whole bunch of just ordinary people who didn't like the direction that America was going and wanted to express some outrage about things happening in America.
That you discovered racism hasn't been eliminated from America should hardly be news, and it hasn't been that long since Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the wrong place on a bus because of her skin color. I hope things have improved a bit over the years, but there still are jerks to be found anywhere. I guess you found some from random people you met in your town and that is too bad, but shouldn't be surprising.
Inferring what a few idiots were saying that may not even believe in the goals of the founders of these Tea Party rallies simply can't be used as a stereotype of what most of those attending really thought. It would be a completely different story if they say "wetback, return to Mexico" from the podium and essentially holding a Klan rally complete with the white sheets being worn by a number of the speakers at the rally. I seriously doubt you ever saw that, and indeed most of those who would organize such a rally would be horrified if anybody even thought to say something like that before the crowd and might even be immediately denounced for saying that. For you to "hear" somebody say a racist slur out of a random group of a hundred or more people, especially in the old south, should hardly be surprising either. You might likely find the same thing visiting your local Wal-Mart or grocery store as well.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:4, Insightful)
#1 - What do you say to the phrase "Taxation is the price we pay for civilized society"?
That's what the warlords told their slaves, and what the kings told their serfs, what the Aztecs told the parents of the children they sacrificed. It's the old argument from tyrants that it's for the "good of the people" that people must suffer. The suffering is never for the rulers, of course.
#2 - http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/hayek_on_social_insurance.html [washingtonpost.com] , what do you have to say?
Ezra Klein is disingenuously being deceptive. He quotes a Hayek passage that saying that a "comprehensive system of social insurance" can be supported as if Hayek was talking about health insurance, which is of course laughably false. He was talking about a limited safety net and government support for victims of natural disasters and the like. It's just BS. Hayek's grudging nod to the necessity of a bare-minimum welfare mechanism for the very neediest in society was not an endorsement of the kind of welfare state currently in evidence, with the IRS enforcing pages of Cadillac health benefits for any "qualifying" insurance, and taxing every implementation of any health provider or consumer up and down the line.
#3 - What other forms of liberty deserve protection? The right to vote? The right to participate in society? The right to have your money, and not your skin color or gender or sexual preference, determine whether or not you can patronize a business?
Individual liberties all deserve protection, collectivist liberties are justifications for tyrannical leadership. Voting, having a say in governance, and other "participation" in society is a necessary duty of individuals for any free society. The current overly burdensome government is a result of too little participation by too few. In the "society" that you seem to be advocating, that "money" isn't even "yours" - it's just an allowance from your ruling overlords.
Note that racism and other forms of discrimination was institutionalized by the very same government that you seem so willing to put in place as the sole arbiter of fairness. It was the moral and religious institutions in the United States that fought for the end to slavery and championed civil rights for all races, and they were opposed at every step by the federal government and the Democratic party. Governments do not have morals, and when they enforce the morals that the most vocal and powerful participants in the political process it's not always a good thing. I happen to think that even were it legal, no business in the US could survive today openly discriminating against people because of race or sexual orientation. And that's the way it should be. The people have the real power, after all, and government is simply a coercive force. They can force businesses to do things you like today, just as they forced liberty-minded people in the 19th century to return slaves to their owners.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:0, Insightful)
Define "hurting others". If I buy a plot of land next door and build an iron smelting facility that spews so much smoke it blankets your backyard, am I "hurting others" or am I just persuing my own rational economic self interest? What if I build that plant further away but I build it large enough that it causes generalized massive smog heverywhere downwind? What if I build so many of them that it starts to affect the global atmosphere?
Like it or not, libertardians are at some point going to have to admit that regulation of economic activity is not "illegal" or "theft" or some other disingenuous bullshit, but is in fact a standard part of preventing one entity from hurting others and the government exists to prevent exactly this kind of abuse via the normal social contract we all enjoy. So the question again comes down to not one of "no government" vs "massive government" but "bad government" vs "good government" and your idiotic "free state project" isn't going to solve any problems that can't also easily be solved elsewhere by simply not electing people who put ideology above rationality.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:4, Insightful)
We have had unregulated markets before, this is not new. They have always resulting in absolute concentration of wealth at the cost of the liberty, health and safety of the common man.
I keep seeing this claim, but I have yet to see an actual example.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the USA, 99% of the means of production is owned by 0.1% of the population. Can't see why that is a priory any better.
And 92% of all statistics are made-up, including this one. Production in the US is still primarily driven by small business, not large corporations. The more regulations from Washington pile up, however, the easier it is for corporations to shut out any competition.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a libertarian and Free State Project early mover.
The few friends I have who go to Tea Party events do so while holding their nose for the sole purpose of hopefully spotting/recruiting the 3% of them who have actual potential for rationalism.
I don't know why you equate libertarian with Tea Party. So many of the comments in this thread are tragically ignorant and insulting.
Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.