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Freedom in Our Lifetime

by Alan W. Bock

The Free State Project aims to establish a libertarian enclave within an authoritarian-minded society. Others have tried and failed. But the Free Staters just might make it work.

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After meeting Jason Sorens and discussing his project with a number of well-informed and responsible people, I'm coming to believe that it just might work. And even if it doesn't work, the Free State Project seems unlikely to do any great harm.

In the process of coming to these preliminary conclusions, I have also come to believe that the prospects for building and maintaining a libertarian movement that has some hope of influencing society are less dim than I had earlier feared. We have friends, sympathizers, and fellow-travelers in interesting places.

The Free State Project is primarily the brainchild of Jason Sorens, 26, a political science lecturer at Yale. It seeks to get 20,000 people to commit to moving to a small, relatively freedom-friendly state and participate in its politics in order to make it more freedom-friendly. Although a number of mainstream newspaper stories (surprisingly few of which have been outright hostile) equate the Free Staters with the Libertarian Party, not all, or perhaps even most, are LP members. The organization's statement of intent simply asks those who sign it to commit themselves to "work toward a society in which the maximum role of civil government is the protection of life, liberty, and property." The group's logo is a porcupine — "Porcupines are cute and non-aggressive, but you don't want to step on them!" — and its newsletter is called The Quill.

When the number of signers of the Statement of Intent reached 5,000 last fall, the group voted to choose a state to move to. The voters chose New Hampshire. The plan is for people to start moving once 20,000 people have committed to the project, and to have the migration completed within five years. If 20,000 people have not signed up by September 2006, the project will be abandoned. A few Free Staters have already begun to move. Perhaps surprisingly, Republican Gov. Craig Benson has endorsed the plan, but not all New Hampshirites are thrilled.

The Free State Project does have some general goals beyond moving a critical mass to one small state; indeed, its stated goal is "Liberty in Our Lifetime," to be accomplished "by first reforming state laws, then opting out of federal mandates, and finally negotiating directly with the federal government for the appropriate political autonomy." Among the means for doing this are:

• "We could reveal and repeal unconstitutional state laws and municipal ordinances."
• "We could repeal state taxes and wasteful state government programs."
• "We could end collaboration between state and federal law enforcement in enforcing unconstitutional federal laws like gun and drug statutes."
• "We could end asset forfeiture and abuses of eminent domain."
• "We could privatize utilities and end inefficient regulations and monopolies."

Are these just dreams? The use of the term "could" suggests that those who decide to make the move will decide what projects to pursue based on what seems politically realistic once they have gotten the lay of the political landscape. As the organization's brochure explains, "Population was a critical factor in the selection process. Our research so far indicates that 20,000 activists could heavily influence only states with populations of 1.5 million or less, or which spend less than $10 million on political campaigns in any given two-year election cycle. New Hampshire met the population criteria, and the state's existing distaste for big government and a generally welcoming attitude for the Free State Project were pluses in its favor." The fact that the state motto is already "Live free or die," and that it still has the first primary in the presidential election cycle, probably didn't hurt either.

I got the opportunity to discuss the project when I was invited to be a panel member at the American Enterprise Institute's Federalism Project seminar regarding it in February. The Orange County Register had previously featured the project in its Sunday Commentary section, and I had written the piece that described previous efforts by libertarians to establish a "new country," or to choose a place to take over or have a disproportionate influence. The other panelists were Sorens; Michael Barone, senior writer for US News and World Report and principal co-author of "The Almanac of American Politics"; and Richard Vedder, distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University. Michael Greve, director of the Federalism Project at AEI, moderated. (A transcript is available at the AEI website.)

I know, many libertarians view AEI as a think tank in the center of the belly of the neocon beast. In some ways it deserves that reputation. Michael Ledeen, who would love for Iran to be the next U.S. military target, hangs out there, as do Richard Perle, Lynne Cheney, David Frum, Newt Gingrich, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the Godfather himself, Irving Kristol.

But AEI is not monolithic. Indeed, Greve explained to me that the idea, once someone is hired, is that he is to have freedom to pursue his own interests and come to his own conclusions. And AEI is home to Charles Murray, Jim Glassman, and John Lott. Federalism Project director Michael Greve declined to describe his own philosophy other than as a "free spirit," but his assistant, Kate Rick, and her husband, have signed up for the Free State Project.

At the seminar, Jason Sorens spoke first. He sounds like a political science instructor, not a bad thing in a movement where most sympathetic academics are economists. He described two widely accepted models of bringing about social and political change in a system of competitive federalism. First is the "Tiebout model: individuals with varying preferences vote on levels and types of public goods to be provided in their local jurisdictions, and people who observe those mixes of public goods move to the jurisdiction that best fits their preferences." In the real world, relying on strictly individual choices would leave smaller-government advocates scattered and outnumbered. He hopes a coordinated effort to move to a single state could overcome these problems.

The second model is "Barry Weingast's 'market-preserving federalism.' When jurisdictions have primary regulatory responsibility over their economies, and capital and labor can move across borders freely, taxpayers and businesses will punish governments that impose inefficient taxes and regulations by moving to other jurisdictions. To forestall this threat, governments in a market-preserving federalist state will tend to keep taxes and regulations low." So the hope is that bringing more freedom-oriented people to a single state will not only lead to smaller government in that state, but have an influence on other states. Sorens believes New Hampshire was a good choice because it is fairly wealthy, pays more in taxes to the federal government than it gets back, and has no large metropolitan areas. It is "highly integrated into the international economy, and its economy is high-tech and knowledge-based."

Michael Barone, perhaps the country's most knowledgeable person on changing demographics in various states and their impact on politics, compared the different courses New Hampshire and Vermont have taken since 1960, when they were quite similar, with Vermont somewhat more Republican.

Since then, according to Barone, "Vermont has attracted culturally left-wing people; New Hampshire has attracted economically right-wing people." New Hampshire's population has consistently grown more than the national average and, in most cases, New Hampshire has been the only state in the Northeast in which that was the case. Politically, New Hampshire is the most libertarian state in the Northeast, and for a while at least, it exerted a real force on national politics. Although it was "inundated by statists" in the 1990s and went for Clinton-Gore, it has retained its taxophobia. In 2002, after the state Supreme Court found in the constitution the responsibility of the state to finance education, voters rejected Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen's attempt to do so with a broad-based school tax. Republican Craig Benson was subsequently elected governor and he appointed a new Supreme Court Justice, so the court is unlikely to try to force the state to enact a school tax again soon.

Economist Richard Vedder noted that migrations have in the past changed regional political cultures, noting the Mormons moving to Utah and Jews moving to Israel. He presented census data showing that "since at least 1850, at any moment in time at least one third of the American population is living in a different state or country than the one in which they were born, and taxes seem to matter a great deal." Between 2001 and 2003 some 819,110 Americans moved from high-tax states into lower-tax states. He claims that this migration has had at least a small impact, with the tax burden in the 10 highest-tax states falling slightly.

I spoke about previous libertarian efforts to establish free states in various parts of the world. These efforts — Minerva on a reef near Tonga in the South Pacific; Abaco, which considered secession when the Bahamas became independent from Great Britain; and Vanuatu in the New Hebrides — have met with little success. None of these efforts led to the establishment of even a small libertarian-oriented country. Nor have efforts to build a ship or floating platform managed to establish a free colony on the high seas.

I wonder whether libertarians, some of whom are not the most congenial of folks, would alienate New Hampshirites of longer residence. But, if at least some of them were savvy activists, they could have an influence beyond what their raw numbers would suggest (Richard Vedder had noted that even 20,000 libertarians would be a minority of those expected to move to New Hampshire, which added 37,082 new residents between April 2001 and July 2003, in the next five years).

If the Free State Project could attract 20,000 people to commit to move, it might have a chance of success. More than 200 years ago, a group of migrants established a country in North America that, from today's perspective, was remarkably libertarian. The founding documents, which most Americans still claim to revere, provide a solid foundation for a free society, although the country has strayed far from this.

And the idea of federalism, with the 50 states serving as 50 laboratories for social and political policies, still has some institutional reality and emotional resonance among Americans, despite 50 years or more of efforts to centralize and impose policy uniformity.

Of course, the only way to find out if New Hampshire could really be a laboratory of liberty is to try it. If 20,000 do decide to move, they will no doubt encounter problems nobody had anticipated, but they might also discover opportunities nobody had sufficiently appreciated. I hope they succeed, although this southern California native is still planning to let climate trump politics in his own life.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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