The Free State Project Betrayed – Part 1

The Free State Project started off with a reasonably clear sketch of a plan:  A state with a Libertarian majority was to be created.  That plan has been sabotaged by outside influencers. We start at the beginning, with a somewhat radical proposal by Jason Sorens.  The proposal was soon to be moderately tuned down:

Announcement: The Free State Project
by Jason Sorens

As published in the Libertarian Enterprise for July 23, 2001

Note from the author (7/2/04): This article was the first exploration of the idea of a “free state strategy.” Needless to say, the present-day Free State Project differs from the proposals of this article in some respects. In particular, the article overemphasizes the possibility of secession. Nevertheless, I think it’s still of historical interest.

Libertarian activists need to face a somber reality: nothing’s working.

Partisan politics has clearly failed: Libertarian presidential candidates consistently fail to break the one per cent barrier, while no Libertarian candidate has ever won election to a federal office. What is the chance that a Libertarian presidential candidate will get even 5% of the presidential vote in the next, say, 20 years? Virtually zero; I’d be willing to bet the farm on that. And what about the chance that Libertarians will take over the Presidency, Congress, and Supreme Court and enact their entire program[1]? One would have to be utterly delusional to consider this a possibility so long as the United States’ political system exists in its current form.

Noting the massive failure of partisan politics, some activists have argued that what we need is education. Unfortunately, the successes of education have come and gone. In academia, free-market ideas (though even then, not radical libertarian ones) were fresh and exciting in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today there is a backlash against libertarian ideas (caricatured as “neoliberalism”) in all disciplines. Political scientists view neoclassical economics as politically na�ve, while even economists have become bored with perfect-market models and have gone back to thinking up new exceptions to the rule.

In response to this argument, Chris Tame of the British Libertarian Alliance believes that we should take a very long-run view. The victory of liberty will take centuries to complete, and we should not be too hasty to abandon the project of remaking intellectual and popular culture. There are several problems with this view. First, it is very depressing for those of who would like to see some measure of freedom in our lifetimes. Second, what’s to prevent the welfare state from winning in the long-run? It has the advantage of fulfilling the interests of elites in government. Reinstating freedom would require repeated large sacrifices by these people. Since people act in self-interest most of the time, the most sensible prediction is that elites will never give up their power; rather, they will reinforce it whenever possible.

Third, the long-run perspective ignores the fact that world affairs are currently at the cusp of a new direction. Freedom can still win out, at least in some areas, but if it does not the prospects are dire. One doesn’t have to see black helicopters everywhere to note that ad hoc world governance structures are already in place. NATO, the OSCE, the practice of economic sanctions, and UN peacekeeping are just a few institutions and policies that effectively prevent nominally independent countries from pursuing policies that conflict in any substantial fashion from the will of Washington, D.C. The OECD is currently pursuing measures to punish so-called “tax havens.”(1) Their low tax rates are draining capital from Western welfare states, and the welfare states want to cut off the spigot. The proposed method of extortion is familiar: economic sanctions. The vaunted benefits of capital mobility and encryption technology thus have failed to materialize, and governments continue to grow, even relative to the private economy. The implications should be clear: if we do not carve out a sphere for freedom now, freedom will be lost for a long time to come.

Some individuals have noted the hopelessness of both mass-based party politics and mass-based education. They have advocated instead the creation of a new libertarian nation. These ideas have tended to be on the fringe of the libertarian movement, simply due to their impracticality, not to mention the fraudulent nature of many of them. They invariably are run by one or two decidedly eccentric individuals who ask for substantial “investments” so that they can start work on the “infrastructure,” typically of some floating island. I have to note that I think the Awdal Roads Project (www.awdal.com) is legitimate, but there are not many American libertarians I know who would be willing to move to Somalia. What we need is a libertarian project that we can undertake right here in the U.S.

Some activism of this sort has been tried, involving “monkey-wrenching” � la Claire Wolfe, “dropping out,” not using government services, etc. The problem with these strategies is that: 1) they are small-scale and unlikely to make a noticeable difference; 2) the more radical projects require abandoning family and friends and leading a lone wolf lifestyle; 3) refraining from using government services in many cases hurts us (financially) and helps them, by making it cheaper for them to provide government services.(2)

(1)OECD, 2000: “Towards Global Tax Co-operation (Report to the 2000 Ministerial Council Meeting and Recommendations by the Committee on Fiscal Affairs): Progress in Identifying and Eliminating Harmful Tax Practices.”

(2)An exception is removing one’s children from the socialized school system, a system so corrupt that the irreparable damage it causes to our children outweighs its conveniences.

(3) http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=21038

[1] Editor’s note: In period, this was David Bergland’s idea of a strategic plan for the 2000-2020 or so period: Advance to Libertarian control of the Federal government within a quarter-century.  No operational plans for reaching this goal were announced.