The Free State Project Betrayed — Part 5

But didn’t we fight a war over secession almost 150 years ago? Wouldn’t the feds just send in the troops to crush our little experiment? The answer, in short, is no. In “modern, democratic” countries the use of violence against legal secessionist movements is out of the question. For example, no one advocates using force to prevent Quebec from leaving Canada if it so decides. The assumption underlying their recent referendum on secession was that if secession achieved a majority vote, negotiations would immediately begin toward a peaceful separation. The same holds for independence movements in Scotland, Wales, Flanders, Padania, Catalonia, and elsewhere. Indeed, the U.S. has militarily attacked countries for the way in which they treated separatist insurgencies. If the fedgov tried to go Milosevic on us free-staters, how would that look? The key is that we need to pursue secession within the political system, electorally. Attempting it extra-legally is a recipe for disaster, as the Republic of Texas fiasco has demonstrated.

There is another advantage to the strategy of secession. It is a sort of “stealth-libertarian” strategy. Most people have a lot of state pride. I used to live in Texas, and it was the general assumption among Texans that we could easily go it alone and become independent, but we stayed in the U.S. merely out of a sense of graciousness and condescension. In other words, people might well vote for a general secessionist party even if they wouldn’t vote for an overtly libertarian party. Of course, once secession is achieved, libertarianism is the likely outcome if we’ve concentrated our forces. Furthermore, independent small states are forced to follow relatively libertarian policies to remain economically viable.

Even if we don’t actually secede, we can force the federal government to compromise with us and grant us substantial liberties. Scotland and Quebec have both used the threat of secession to get large subsidies and concessions from their respective national governments. We could use our leverage for liberty.

This strategy seems eminently workable within the next decade. The only difficulty is what game theorists refer to as a “coordination problem.” If I know that other libertarians will join me in moving to a certain state, it’s in my interests to move there too, but if I think others won’t join me, I might as well stay where I friends and a good job. Everyone else thinks the same way, and no one moves. For that reason, I think we do need a formal organizational structure. We need a sort of pledge to which we can get freedom-minded people to sign their names, similar to the Separation of School and State pledge. We would pledge to move to any state which is decided on by a majority of the members of the “Free State Society.” (The details of how the voting would ensue could be worked out. My current idea is that we could have a list of states with less than 1 million population. Once the “Free State Society” reaches 20,000 members we could vote on these sequentially, with the lowest vote getters being eliminated in each round. Votes would be made public each time to forestall fears of manipulation.) Since as libertarians we respect contracts, we would rightly feel duty bound to honor our pledges. The coordination problem would be solved.