Free State invasion of NH

The Free State Project is a libertarian organization that is looking to move 20,000 libertarians to NH, and to impact (i.e., take over) our local government.  They have already chosen the small town they intend to occupy first. Our wonderful governor, Craig Benson, loves the libertarians and is assisting them by appointing them to state committees.  From the Concord Monitor:

A panel authorized by the governor to find inefficiencies in the state health and transportation departments is composed almost entirely of members of the Free State Project and includes a longtime antagonist of the Division of Children, Youth and Families. Gov. Craig Benson [also] chose John Babiarz, head of the state Libertarian Party, to chair the committee and select its members last month.

We have a new group, DFNH, (the state version of DFA), and are planning to protest an upcoming event the Libertarians are sponsoring at which Benson is the keynote speaker.  They got wind of our plans and are beginning to attack us.  I feel like I've put my arm in a viper's nest.

•  They picked NH

  So they can suck off the teat of Massachusetts.

  When they realized there was no high growth state to leach on in Wyoming...

  by Stirling Newberry on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 02:55:25 PM PDT

•  Sounds great to me

  I love those guys.  It's a terrific idea and a novel way of getting their voice heard.

  I have no idea what the connection with Benson is, but don't be surprised that they start disproportionally cropping up in office; you have to assume that the ones that actually move there for this reason are going to be a fiercely politically active bunch, after all.  10 activist people incredibly committed to changing the system on a very grassroots level is going to be more powerful (and visible) than 100 people that put on a bumper sticker and vote a party ticket and that's the extent of it.  There are some obvious things that give people a bit more political hegemony than your average citizen: wealth and fame being chief among them.  But sheer wherewithall is up there, too.  These guys have it.  

  I for one applaud them.    

  by glibfidget on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 02:57:42 PM PDT

  •  This isn't so funny

    I work in New Hampshire, and plenty of my friends live there.

    The Free Staters are a group of 20,000 ultra-radical libertarians (at a minimum, they supposedly wish to reduce goverment services by two thirds).

    Among other things, they want to:

    1. Repeal all regulation of business.
    2. Legalize all drugs.  (We already have a very bad heroin problem in VT and NH.)
    3. Abolish public education.

    Unless I'm missing something, these three goals, taken together, would allow television advertising of smack to uneducated minors.

    Basically, these guys are ideologues, just as out of touch with reality as your typical Maoist or Trotskyite.  And they're planning to inject millions of dollars into state-level politics.

    Libertarians are all very likable until they actually start trying to mess around in your back yard.

    by vtdem on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:12:24 PM PDT

    •  Expect the backlash

      I know a number of people in NH and they seem to be very "integrated" into their communities. People have lived in the same small town for years, everybody knows everybody else from way back.  One of my friends bought a house that everyone still refers to as the "X's house" when the X's sold the house back in the 70's.

      I'd have to assume that either these outsiders won't get far or there'll be a backlash like you can't imagine.

      NH was a bad pick... if only because all of the towns I've visited seem to already have a large percentage of the population involved into local government and policy.  They should have picked an area with more apathetic voters.

      by Roastbeef on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:24:35 PM PDT

    •  I'm in favor of all those things

      Again, sounds great to me.

      If you don't like it, don't vote for it, but they have just as much a right to involve themselves in the democratic process as you do.  

      Besides, it beats the Republicans.  At least they'll heavily support reproductive rights, gay marriage, be heavily against foreign intervention, erosion of civil liberties, etc etc etc.

      Could be worse.  You could live in Utah.      

      by glibfidget on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:30:22 PM PDT

      •  Humpf.

        Again, sounds great to me.

        Well, speaking as a New Englander (by any standard--I've got over 25 generations up here), I'm not amused by 20,000 people who apparently think it's OK to advertise smack to kids and deny them a public education, and who want to dump millions of dollars into local politics.

        I don't mind the local libertarians--a few of them are a bit nutty, but they're generally good folks.  But the Free Staters give off the undeniable scent of loons with radical plans for restructuring society.

        If you don't like it, don't vote for it, but they have just as much a right to involve themselves in the democratic process as you do.

        Oh, certainly, the Free Staters have every right to attempt to influence New Hampshire's politics any legal way they want (and I will defend that right, just as I do for far more dangerous people).  It's just that I have the tradional northern New England aversion to folks who move into town solely for the sake of inflicting utopias on the locals.  And if any DFNH folks need moral or logistical support dealing with Free Staters, please let me know.

        by vtdem on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 04:35:03 PM PDT

        •  Then leave the state

          But are you even in NH? Its called democracy and these people have the courage of their convictions to pick up, move to the other side of the country, bear some terribly cold weather (I with they would have chosen a state back West), and try to improve the country.

          This is one of the great benefits of a federal system. Each state can try their own mix and don't have to be the same. In fact, they probably shouldn't be the same to help provide for diversity and test out different theories of government. At one time American was just an experiment in a democratic system. Some of the great ideas are the ones that people don't think will work.

          I am interested to see how their libertarian laboratory works out. I hope they will take a sane approach to repealing government though, as to not just try to jump right in a scare everybody into disliking the idea.
          

          by jjayson on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 05:39:42 PM PDT

        •  I just moved to Pittsburgh...

          From Maine, where I lived for a number of years, so you're talking to a fellow New Englander.  I have a fair few ties to New Hampshire (hell, I have a fair few ties to most everywhere).

          I'm not going to correct you on the policy stuff, as I don't want to turn this into another condescending dogpile on the Libertarian thread (though I'll be happy to elsewhere), but, here's the real point.  Politics is all about give and take.  The Libertarians could number 200,000 and they wouldn't take over New Hampshire and create a Libertarian society.  Neither the Democrats or Republicans have managed to create an idealic (for them) state, so it's a bit unreasonable to assume that the Libertarians will be the first to manage it.  Your state is not going to become semi-anarchaic overnight (if ever).  Sleep easy.  

          What political parties and activists DO achieve, however, is shifting the national dialouge, getting certain things through (and those things don't get through without support anyway), maybe, if they're lucky, getting people to shift their perspectives.  I'm a Libertarian, and even I don't want all public office to be filled with Libertarians tomorrow.  Nor do I want all public offices to be filled with Republicans, or Democrats, or Greens, or whatever.  That's just not how it works, nor how it SHOULD work.  What Libertarians, if they're successful, DO do is shift the terms of the debate.  It's like anything else in politics: if you get ground you're able to shift the focus towards some of your ideas, you get to refocus the debate.  You don't get your entire platform implemented tomorrow.  Think of the candidates you've supported in the past that didn't win (Dean comes to mind).  Were their campaigns futile and utter failures because they failed to achieve 100% policy success?  No, of course not, that's a ridiculous yardstick to judge them by.  But, they ARE successful, even if they lose, if they are able to plant the seed of some of their better ideas into the flow of political discourse.  

          Think of it that way.  If 200,000 Libertarians moved next door tomorrow, smack ads won't show up on your TV by Friday.  What WILL happen is they will shift the political landscape, and as far as progressives should be concerned, that's not all bad.  A landscape shifting Libertarian will be monumentally more progressive on things like gay marriage, reproductive rights, armed neutrality in foreign policy, fair bilateral trade, balanced budgets, a justice system that views civil liberties as paramount, etc etc etc.  Hell, the Libertarians, right off the bat, by definition, believe in HALF of the progressive agenda, and probably believe it more fiercely and actively than a lot of Democrats do.  They can be a powerful ally, even if you don't like the other half of their ideas (and if you keep your own party strong, the give and take of politics will mean that the stuff you don't like doesn't have to go through, but the stuff you DO agree on will be that much easier to push because you'll have no just one party, but two, pushing like hell for it).

          That's how politics works.  And again, there could be a lot worse people moving in next door to you, people that you can find NO common ground with (again, think of the backwards parts of Utah).    If the Libertarians are successful with the Free State project (which is itself very much up in the air), it won't change everything overnight, but it will alter the flow of discourse in your state, and in a lot of cases, will do so in a way that you might, crazily enough, find yourself pretty damn happy about.

          That's my take on it anyway.  Again, I applaud them.  Hell, New Hampshire is a terrific state, I just may join them someday.  :)  I promise though that when I'm wandering around with a bell and a sandwitch board advertising "Tokes For Tots", that I'll steer clear of your block.  Deal?          

          by glibfidget on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 06:47:35 PM PDT

          •  It's the unfalsifiability, not the policy

            I live and work in the Upper Valley, a NH/VT border community, with most of the actual non-farming economy in NH.  Right now, I live in Vermont and work a few miles away in New Hampshire.  Unfortunately, this leaves me little room to escape a complete political meltdown across the river, especially since that's where all the good school districts are.  My loyalty is to my local community first and my current state of residence second.  Disasterous New Hampshire politics would hurt the twin state community quite badly, so I take an interest.

            Think of it that way.  If 200,000 Libertarians moved next door tomorrow, smack ads won't show up on your TV by Friday.

            My arguments aren't with moderate Libertarian policy.  In fact, I have a lot of sympathy for libertarian political positions.

            My concern with the Free State Project is a bit simpler--I've read their web sites, mailing lists, and other materials (extensively), and concluded that many Free Staters, including much of the leadership, are downright nuts.  All the policy positions I've complained about (including the opposition to public education) are straight off the FSP's web site.  And you may doubt it, but the FSP is talking about spending enough money to have a substantial impact on New Hampshire politics, which are already being run by a fiscally incompetent pseudo-Libertarian who's embraced the FSP with both arms.

            Imagine, if you will, that you were a sober Swedish socialist, and you discovered that 20,000 Trotskyite activists were descending on your neighborhood with plans to turn it into a a communist utopia.  The problem isn't their political opinions.  The problem is that they're breathing the smoke of their own ideology, and no conceivable evidence could ever disprove their beliefs.

            Now, you may think I'm mischaracterizing the relative sanity of the FSP members.  But I've known a wide range of libertarians and Objectivists in my life, and studied their political thought fairly extensively.  And the FSPers alarm me only slightly less than the most radical Peikoff Objectivists.

            If you want me to worry less, then you'll need to convince me that FSP members have a strong enough grip on reality to recognize when one of their policies has failed, and that maintaining a functioning civil society is more important to them than implementing every last detail of their free market fundamentalism.  Unfortunately, I was far more inclined to believe these things until I did research.

            by vtdem on Thu Jun 17, 2004 at 08:08:50 AM PDT

            •  Oh, yeah

              Feel free to parade around with "tokes for tots" sign.  It's worth a laugh, and there are some pretty darn good arguments for marijuana legalization, especially up here--the stuff grows wild in the woods, and the anti-pot laws are completely unenforcable.

              The local heroin problem, on the other hand, isn't funny.  It's apparently coming down I-91 and onto I-89 (judging from police reports and local rumor) before being distributed throughout New Hampshire.  The big target seems to be teenagers.  I'm not at all interested in legalizing the sale and advertising of this crud; it's just bad news.
              

              by vtdem on Thu Jun 17, 2004 at 08:35:15 AM PDT

              •  you're getting hung up....

                On the kids and teenagers bit.  Even the most radical libertarians agree with you on that, as minors aren't legally able to form consent, and thus do NOT or SHOULD not have the right to do heroin, smoke weed, drink, smoke cigarrettes, etc.  At the core of the Libertarian philosophy is the notion that people have the right to decide for themselves, but in the case of minors, they don't have the faculty to decide for themselves, which is why the consent in those cases is through the parents, who are their legal guardians.  So, don't worry, even the Free Staters agree with on that, kids shouldn't be allowed to do heroin and we should protect them from it, make it illegal to sell to them or advertise to them, etc etc.

                I don't think that the legalize drugs or do away with public education ideas are particularly nutty, myself, and even if so, no more nutty than the Libertarian party itself, which believes in those things as part of their party platform.  To that end, I don't think it has anything to do with being nutty at all so much as having a different perspective than yourself.  To perfectly sane Republicans, Dennis Kucinich seems completely off his tit.  To you, a Vermont Dem, I'd imagine you sympathize with his ideas quite a bit.  So who's crazy?  The Libertarian ideas you're talking about have perfectly sane and rational justifications behind them (imagine, for instance, that we got by as a nation for over 100 years without a dime being spent by our government on education, and produced in that environment some of the best thinkers in history).  You don't agree with them, which is fine, but that doesn't, I don't think, make you sane and them crazy.  It just means you don't agree on politics, which believe it or not is a pretty damn common thing in America.  

                Anyway, I'm not trying to convert you or anything (as VermontDem, I can't imagine I'd have much success :)), and your point is well taken, since you DON'T agree with them you SHOULD be worried about them moving in next door, because they will have an affect on local politics, sometimes in ways you won't agree with.  I would expect, if you're interested in not handing over political control to them, that what you would do is vote against their ideas that you don't like, support candidates that match your positions, get active yourself maybe as a volunteer, donor, or even candidate, and do all those things that people do in democracies to try to ensure that their agendas get pushed through as much as possible.  And, while you're doing that, so will they, and hopefully, if half of the state is progressive and half is Libertarian (oh but for a perfect world), you'll reach, in terms of public policy, some sort of compromise in which both of your ideas get a fair amount of representation.  And that's the whole point, innit?

                And look at it practically.  It'll temper the Republicans (a lot of Republicans in NH lean Libertarian anyway, a big Libertarian movement in the state will effectively quash the whole neo-con wing of the party there), and provide ample active support for a Progressive social and fp agenda.  That doesn't sound all that bad to me.  

                I don't expect you to become Libertarian, but a measure of tolerance, I think, is always wise.  And, as I said, look on the bright side, the Christian Coalition could be moving in next door tomorrow, and then we'd really be fucked.  :)        

                by glibfidget on Thu Jun 17, 2004 at 10:10:14 AM PDT

•  Coming

  Wow, I blogged about this a long time ago. I laughed at the "Free State Project" then, and I still laugh at it now. NH is trending Dem. These guys might be able to mess around a bit with local politics, but they aren't going to keep NH red.

  What I'd really love to know if these libertarians are being paid to sit on this "panel." Ah, to leach off the government.

  by DavidNYC on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:01:05 PM PDT

  •  Libertarians aren't "red"!

    They're, what, yellow? Green? Mauve? I dunno. But they're libertarians, not Republicans. They'll vote against drug laws, they'll vote in favor of abortion rights, they won't cooperate with the Patriot act.

    I, for one, will be interested to see if they manage to make a significant dent in policies in NH.
    

    by HarlanNY on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:09:14 PM PDT

    •  Oh, They Will

      New Hampshire only has a little under 1.3 million people living in it, and the FSP is injecting 20,000 activist libertarians.  That's one libertarian for every 65 or 70 New Hampshirers (Hampshirinians?.)  If we're conservative and we say that another half a percent of the state's population already agrees with them, then that number drops to about 48 regular citizens per libertarian.

      Assuming most of the libertarians will volunteer, write LTEs, canvas, GOTV, etc., that is a staggeringly low number.  They could be a significant minority party (a la the Progressive Party in Vermont) within a few years.

      by Slade on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:22:06 PM PDT

      •  Jobs

        They won't get nearly that many. A lot of libertarians complained that New Hampshire was too cold. (Not so rugged after all, ay?) I'd be shocked if they got more than a thousand. I mean, they are asking people to uproot their entire lives - at a time when it is very, very hard to find a job.

        by DavidNYC on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 10:44:49 PM PDT

    •  Yellow

      For the record.  :)

      Though, bear in mind that 20,000 is just a goal.  I'd be flabbergasted if they actually got that many.  

      by glibfidget on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:27:36 PM PDT

      •  Maybe

        They'd got 5,000 now, or so they claim.  20,000 might be a little farfetched, but there's a decent chance they'll make it.

        by Slade on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:31:43 PM PDT

  •  Agreed

    Whatever small proportion of the 20,000 FSPer's that actually ends up moving there is (I would guess <5,000 voting age people when it's all said and done), it's going to pale in comparison to the Dem-leaning MA and NY expats and the increase in the (hopefully Dem-leaning) Hispanic population.

    They really should have gone with Wyoming, where the population and population growth are lower.  Hell, the Greens (or some other leftie organization) should think about taking over Wyoming.

    by Ickey shuffle on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:21:56 PM PDT

•  Check out

  www.christianexodus.org

  Looking for a few good fundamentalist rednecks.

  Maybe we can put both groups in one state?

  by PopeFlick on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:21:20 PM PDT

  •  Jesus! Free Drugs! No Education!

    ...spells...

    in-dok-trin-a-shun

    now, if you trip a little more acid, I'll tell you why Jesus hates the rainforests!

    by ultrageek on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:29:52 PM PDT

•  wrong approach

  We have a new group, DFNH, (the state version of DFA), and are planning to protest an upcoming event the Libertarians are sponsoring

  It might be more productive to dialog, and emphasize the issues on which particular Dem candidates agree with them, most obviously Patriot Act. Granny D, in particular, seems the kind of Democtrat who could pick up considerable support from the Free Staters.

  by ben masel on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:34:25 PM PDT

  •  I should have said

    we're protesting Gov. Benson and some of his recent actions at this event.  However, by choosing this event at which to protest, we'd be hard-pressed to say we're not protesting the Free Staters as well.

    I'm not sure about the value of dialogue.  As someone mentioned upthread, these people seem to be ideologues, and I'm not sure any of us would persuade or dissuade them of anything.  They seem smart and focused.  It's a little chilling, really.

    by elizsan on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:51:11 PM PDT

    •  You're not going to dissuade.

      But you can identify areas of agreement, and co-operate on those.

      by ben masel on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:58:56 PM PDT

•  If Benson loves them, then they must be

  far-righters. He is very far-right.

  It seems like that state's Republicans are beginning to support gay-bashing and various other bigoted ideas. I guess that will only accelerate thanks to these bozos.

  by JamesB3 on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:48:22 PM PDT

  •  As I understood the Free State Project's plan,

    the idea was to form issue by issue alliances with the big Parties, not marriages. Court them as allies on gay issues.

    by ben masel on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 03:56:27 PM PDT

  •  ah, no

    Libertarians will not consciously do anything that will accelerate gay-bashing.  As noted up-thread, Libertarians have many things in common with the most liberal of Demos.  They are distinctly not Repubs.

    by IowaLibert on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 04:29:40 PM PDT

•  there goes the neighborhood?

  "They have already chosen the small town they intend to occupy first."

  Letting that information out is poor house-buying strategy - prices just went up several percent.

  On the other hand, if current residents take the "there goes the neighborhood" attitude, could be a good way for Liberts to pick up some good bargains!  :-)

  (for those on a way different wavelength - I'm just having a little fun here.)

  by IowaLibert on Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 04:48:58 PM PDT