Why Not a Free State Project in My State?
Dear Dennis,
I love the idea of the Free State Project and acknowledge its significant wins. But I think it is better for me to replicate its success in my state rather than to migrate to New Hampshire.
Signed, Don't Want to Move
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Dear Don't Want,
I just want to check that you understood the essential element of the Free State Project strategy.
Porcupines regularly hear from libertarians who don't want to migrate for freedom that they do not have to migrate to New Hampshire. Instead, the out-of-state libertarian will happily conclude, there can be a Free State Project "in every state" -- or at least in *their state*, which translates in the aggregate to every state.
Such proposals do solve the problem for the hesitant-to-move of not requiring migration to create a free state, but only if one true believed that the same outcome from concentrating libertarians from 50 states into one small state, could be produced by keeping libertarians dispersed across 50 states (or in your case, two states, ignoring that most people would rather not move)
The proposal that doesn't require a U-Haul ignores the only differential advantage that the Free State Project has: aggregating a significant portion of the libertarian movement into one state until that one state is free. The freedom does not come about because the movement has a cool name, nor that it has an intention to create a freed society, but because there would finally be **enough** libertarians in that **one, small** state to turn it into a libertarian state.
We have thousands and thousands of libertarians who have migrated so far, with thousands more arriving behind them. We have built an economic, social, political, family, etc infrastructure interlocking hundreds of networks and institutions and associations that would be impossible to build in other states -- not because you wouldn't like them, but because your state lacks the sufficient numbers of libertarians to do the necessary work to build them all.
Despite incredible gains, after 20 years of building, the Free State still needs more numbers in order to effect that free state. Now is not the time to take the foot off the gas pedal. In fact, we are reaching a tipping point. We need your reinforcement now to take advantage of the breach that the vanguard has open so widely.
The FSP strategy -- correctly understood -- is demonstrably working.
The only way the Free State Project strategy could fail is if the migrants who will make it succeed were told that concentration can happen "everywhere", or were diverted to nascent other "concentrations", without as fertile a soil, and requiring at least another 20 year to build up the infrastructure we have built here ... if they had the numbers to build that infrastructure .. which a dispersed libertarian population would not them
In short, the only way to defeat the FSP's strategy of concentration in one state is to supplant it with a strategy of dispersing libertarians across many states.
Such a defeating strategy has to convince libertarians to ignore libertarians' very low numbers relative to the authoritarians who enslave us, to forget that it is a small sliver of libertarians who are based enough to actually build liberty -- if we could accumulate them all together, and to minimize the amount of time it takes to build up that infrastructure, even if other states somehow, somewhere magically got the necessary concentration (without anyone migrating to concentrate at all
So, when we hear a strategy proposed that suggests that we have sufficient numbers of libertarians to "concentrate" them in every state (or as usually presented, in your state, and then in her state, and then in his state), I must explore whether the actual FSP strategy is not comprehended, whether our severe limitations on the one, essential resource -- based libertarians -- is not recognized, whether the wish to have a free state without the cost of migration has caused a blindness to what must logically be done to succeed with this particular (and actually winning) strategy, or
whether it's an attempt to thwart the one libertarian strategy that is actually succeeding after decades (centuries?) of trying.
I don't believe it is the latter with you, Don't Want. I hope my questions don't come off as antagonistic.
Instead, why don't you come out to learn what we are building, and more importantly what is essential to *how* we are building it ...
... With lots of libertarians -- who were initially dispersed as low incidence, disparaged, minority populations across the many states -- migrating to concentrate in one friendly-to-liberty state, rolling up our sleeves, and investing the decades of labor necessary to build the supporting networks.
Towards Human Freedom,
Dennis
Dear Dennis,
I love the idea of the Free State Project and acknowledge its significant wins. But I think it is better for me to replicate its success in my state rather than to migrate to New Hampshire.
Signed, Don't Want to Move
------
Dear Don't Want,
I just want to check that you understood the essential element of the Free State Project strategy.
Porcupines regularly hear from libertarians who don't want to migrate for freedom that they do not have to migrate to New Hampshire. Instead, the out-of-state libertarian will happily conclude, there can be a Free State Project "in every state" -- or at least in *their state*, which translates in the aggregate to every state.
Such proposals do solve the problem for the hesitant-to-move of not requiring migration to create a free state, but only if one true believed that the same outcome from concentrating libertarians from 50 states into one small state, could be produced by keeping libertarians dispersed across 50 states (or in your case, two states, ignoring that most people would rather not move)
The proposal that doesn't require a U-Haul ignores the only differential advantage that the Free State Project has: aggregating a significant portion of the libertarian movement into one state until that one state is free. The freedom does not come about because the movement has a cool name, nor that it has an intention to create a freed society, but because there would finally be **enough** libertarians in that **one, small** state to turn it into a libertarian state.
We have thousands and thousands of libertarians who have migrated so far, with thousands more arriving behind them. We have built an economic, social, political, family, etc infrastructure interlocking hundreds of networks and institutions and associations that would be impossible to build in other states -- not because you wouldn't like them, but because your state lacks the sufficient numbers of libertarians to do the necessary work to build them all.
Despite incredible gains, after 20 years of building, the Free State still needs more numbers in order to effect that free state. Now is not the time to take the foot off the gas pedal. In fact, we are reaching a tipping point. We need your reinforcement now to take advantage of the breach that the vanguard has open so widely.
The FSP strategy -- correctly understood -- is demonstrably working.
The only way the Free State Project strategy could fail is if the migrants who will make it succeed were told that concentration can happen "everywhere", or were diverted to nascent other "concentrations", without as fertile a soil, and requiring at least another 20 year to build up the infrastructure we have built here ... if they had the numbers to build that infrastructure .. which a dispersed libertarian population would not them
In short, the only way to defeat the FSP's strategy of concentration in one state is to supplant it with a strategy of dispersing libertarians across many states.
Such a defeating strategy has to convince libertarians to ignore libertarians' very low numbers relative to the authoritarians who enslave us, to forget that it is a small sliver of libertarians who are based enough to actually build liberty -- if we could accumulate them all together, and to minimize the amount of time it takes to build up that infrastructure, even if other states somehow, somewhere magically got the necessary concentration (without anyone migrating to concentrate at all
So, when we hear a strategy proposed that suggests that we have sufficient numbers of libertarians to "concentrate" them in every state (or as usually presented, in your state, and then in her state, and then in his state), I must explore whether the actual FSP strategy is not comprehended, whether our severe limitations on the one, essential resource -- based libertarians -- is not recognized, whether the wish to have a free state without the cost of migration has caused a blindness to what must logically be done to succeed with this particular (and actually winning) strategy, or
whether it's an attempt to thwart the one libertarian strategy that is actually succeeding after decades (centuries?) of trying.
I don't believe it is the latter with you, Don't Want. I hope my questions don't come off as antagonistic.
Instead, why don't you come out to learn what we are building, and more importantly what is essential to *how* we are building it ...
... With lots of libertarians -- who were initially dispersed as low incidence, disparaged, minority populations across the many states -- migrating to concentrate in one friendly-to-liberty state, rolling up our sleeves, and investing the decades of labor necessary to build the supporting networks.
Towards Human Freedom,
Dennis