“Proponents of liberty and personal responsibility haven’t been winning many battles lately. Government spending has gone off the rails. Government surveillance and intrusiveness are approaching big brother levels. All manner of programs and subsidies have created an unnatural dependence on government something like a 25-year old still living with his parents.” - Dan McGuire, Free State Project

The Stanford Libertarians recently reorganized after having lapsed in activity since 2001. If you are a fellow student who believes that self ownership reigns supreme and that all levels of government are generally far too intrusive, please e-mail stanford.libertarians@gmail.com to become involved.

At our first meeting of the year on May 17, Dan McGuire joined us as the Pacific Northwest Coordinator of The Free State Project. The FSP is a non-profit corporation that at press time has joined 6,545 Libertarians and classical liberals by their promise to move to New Hampshire within 5 years of the project acquiring 20,000 pledged members. I make member number 6,545, so I have a very special interest in sharing the project’s merits.

Mr. McGuire’s presentation provided a thorough background of the project, and I credit the following synopsis of Free Staters’ motivation and actions to the text of his slides. The FSP originated with an essay by Jason Sorens published in the July 23, 2001 electronic Libertarian Enterprise. Sorens received about 200 e-mail responses in the first week after its publication; the FSP organized online and established their status as a non-profit in Nevada.

In August 2003, when the project had acquired 5,000 members, they voted from ten candidate states - AK, DE, ID, ME, MT, ND, NH, SD, VT, and WY - for the location of the free state. New Hampshire won over 2nd place Wyoming by ten percent, and the many reasons for its lead include: “no income tax, no sales tax, no smoking ban, no helmet laws, no cell phone bans, the first gay Episcopal bishop, lax marijuana enforcement, no fireworks laws, no raw milk laws, and no seat belt laws.” The idea is that the pledged “liberty-minded people...will improve the state’s already fairly free culture by working to repeal laws and regulations.” Also, New Hampshire has 400 state legislators with 3,000 constituents per district, so local politics can still thrive there.

As of 2003, according to the Libertarian Party, there were 600 Libertarians in public office across the nation, mostly in local city and county council positions. Though the LP is the U.S. political party with the third highest number of supporters, they are thinly spread. Mr. McGuire told me, “Libertarians, once the mainstream of American politics, are now too scattered to affect elections and thus once again demonstrate the benefits of freedom. We need to concentrate our efforts in a small enough place with a significant enough government.”

In signing my Statement of Intent to participate, I identified my ultimate motivation as the same as Dan’s: “My wife Carol and I are participating in the Free State Project because we don’t want to look back on our lives and wonder whether we did all we could for liberty.”