{"id":31,"date":"2003-09-29T18:48:00","date_gmt":"2003-09-29T23:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=31"},"modified":"2003-09-29T18:48:00","modified_gmt":"2003-09-29T23:48:00","slug":"statism-love-it-or-leave-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=31","title":{"rendered":"Statism &mdash; Love It Or Leave It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For many years I&#8217;ve been seeing proposals for implementing<br \/>\nlibertarian reforms that look superficially appealing and plausible,<br \/>\nbut on closer examination run hard aground either on some pesky<br \/>\nreality of politics as it is or the extreme difficulty of waging a<br \/>\nsuccessful revolution.  Since I&#8217;m a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/~esr\/faqs\/libertarianism.html\">libertarian<\/a>,<br \/>\nyou may well imagine that I find this annoying.  How do we get there<br \/>\nfrom here?<\/p>\n<p>For the first time, I think I&#8217;ve seen a path that is both<br \/>\nprincipled and practical.  Not the whole path, but some firm steps<br \/>\nthat both accomplish good in themselves and open up great<br \/>\npossibilities.  And the best part is that it&#8217;s a path most statists<br \/>\ncan&#8217;t object to, one that uses the premises of the existing federal<br \/>\nsystem to achieve a fair first test of libertarian ideas within that<br \/>\nsystem.  Even opponents of libertarianism, if they are fair-minded,<br \/>\nshould welcome this reality check.  Libertarians should cheer it on<br \/>\nand join it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had troubles with other libertarians recently.  Too many have<br \/>\nretreated into isolationism in the face of a war with terrorism that I<br \/>\ndo not believe we can or should evade.  The isolationists judge that<br \/>\nempowering the State when we use it as an instrument of self-defense<br \/>\nhas consequences for the long term that are more dangerous than<br \/>\nterrorists&#8217; aims are in the short term. I sympathize with this view,<br \/>\nbut when all is said and done, Al-Qaeda shahids with backpack nukes<br \/>\nfrom the &#8216;stans are more of a danger than John Ashcroft has ever been.<br \/>\nI have done my homework and if anything, I believe the U.S. Government<br \/>\nis <em>understating<\/em> the danger we face.<\/p>\n<p>But the dangers of empowering the State to fight a necessary war<br \/>\nmake it more, not less urgent that we pursue all possibilities for<br \/>\nlibertarian reform at home.  Now, I think I see a workable one.  What<br \/>\nif, by perfectly legal and proper means, we could take over a small<br \/>\nAmerican state and actually try out our ideas there?<\/p>\n<p>Yes, I thought it was a crazy idea when I first heard it.  An<br \/>\nentire <em>state<\/em>?  How?  But the <a href='http:\/\/www.freestateproject.org\/'>Free State Project<\/a> has<br \/>\ndone the math.  I&#8217;ve looked at their arguments and trend curves, and<br \/>\nI&#8217;m pretty much convinced.  It can be done.  We can do it.  The<br \/>\nkey is very simple; enough of us just have to <em>move<\/em><br \/>\nthere. Vote with our feet, and then vote in a bloc.  And why<br \/>\na state?  Becausr that&#8217;s the only intermediate level of government<br \/>\nwith enough autonomy to make a good laboratory.<\/p>\n<p>The Free State Project identified ten small states where 20,000<br \/>\nactive libertarians would be a critically large voting bloc.  They are<br \/>\nsigning up libertarians and like-minded people to vote on the target<br \/>\nstate and to move there when the group passes 20,000.  The winning<br \/>\nstate will be announced on 1st October; they&#8217;ve signed up about 5400<br \/>\npeople so far, on a classic exponential growth curve with a six-month<br \/>\ndoubling time that should get them there in late 2004.<\/p>\n<p>What could be more American than migrating to a thinly-settled area<br \/>\nto experiment with liberty?  And this time we won&#8217;t have to kill off the<br \/>\nnatives, because they&#8217;re not going to be organizing any scalping parties.<br \/>\nMost of the states under consideration have a strong local<br \/>\nlibertarian tradition, and none of them are going to look askance at<br \/>\nthe sort of bright, hardworking, highly-skilled people most likely to<br \/>\nbe pro-freedom activists.<\/p>\n<p>Some people won&#8217;t like this idea, though.  The national media<br \/>\nestablishment, which is statist down to its bones even in the few<br \/>\ncrevices where it isn&#8217;t leftist, will inevitably try to portray the<br \/>\nFree State migrants as a bunch of racist conservative redneck gun-nuts<br \/>\n(all these terms being effectively synonymous in the national media)<br \/>\nintent on turning the poor victim state into one gigantic Aryan<br \/>\nNations compound (especially if it&#8217;s Idaho, as it could be).  Expect<br \/>\nnetwork-news interviews with locals teary-eyed with worry that the<br \/>\nincomers will be hosting regular cross-burnings on the courthouse<br \/>\nlawn.  Awkward little inconsistencies like the libertarian opposition<br \/>\nto drug laws, censorship, and theocracy will be ignored. This prospect<br \/>\nis especially ironic because, in most of the possible target states,<br \/>\nit is our lifestyle liberalism that is actually most likely to produce<br \/>\na culture clash with the natives.<\/p>\n<p>The more intelligent members of the political class won&#8217;t like this<br \/>\neither.  The brighter and better-able one is to extrapolate<br \/>\nsecond-and-third-order effects, the more likely the potential success<br \/>\nof libertarianism at a state level is likely to scare them &mdash;<br \/>\nconservatives nearly as much as liberals, and conservatives perhaps<br \/>\nmore so when we challenge them to emulate our success with<br \/>\nsmall-government policies that they speak but don&#8217;t really mean.<\/p>\n<p>But I don&#8217;t think this will be easy to stop.  Libertarian<br \/>\ndemographics being what they are, 20,000 of us in a small state will<br \/>\nbe a <em>huge<\/em> concentration of technical, creative and<br \/>\nentrepreneurial talent.  We&#8217;ll found software businesses, studios,<br \/>\ninnovative light-manufacturing shops and engineering companies<br \/>\nby the bucketload.  We&#8217;ll create favorable regulatory conditions<br \/>\nfor old-line businesses like financial-services houses and for<br \/>\nbleeding-edge ones like the private space-launch industry.<br \/>\nWe&#8217;ll attract more people like us.  The lucky state, especially<br \/>\nif it&#8217;s depressed and mostly rural like a lot of the candidates, will<br \/>\nexperience a renaissance.  And we&#8217;ll get to make the difference.<\/p>\n<p>The real fun will start when Americans elsewhere start asking &#8220;Why<br \/>\ncan&#8217;t <em>our<\/em> state be more like this?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Liberty in our lifetime?  I think this might be how to get there.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=106488286262604201\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For many years I&#8217;ve been seeing proposals for implementing libertarian reforms that look superficially appealing and plausible, but on closer examination run hard aground either on some pesky reality of politics as it is or the extreme difficulty of waging a successful revolution. Since I&#8217;m a libertarian, you may well imagine that I find this&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=31\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Statism &mdash; Love It Or Leave It<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}