NH Legislature Passes School Choice by Veto-Proof Majority

The New Hampshire House and Senate have overwhelmingly approved a bill that would give businesses tax credits for contributing to scholarship funds, which could make payments on behalf of students attending private schools. Even if the governor vetoes, the bill should pass into law. According to the Ruger-Sorens database of state policies, New Hampshire will [...]

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NH GOP Kills Gay Marriage Repeal

The New Hampshire House, dominated 3-to-1 by Republicans, has just voted by an approximately 2-to-1 majority to kill a bill that would have repealed same-sex marriage and reinstate civil unions. Along with passage of marijuana decriminalization (by a single vote), this vote helps to demonstrate the increasingly libertarian, live-and-let-live character of the New Hampshire GOP.(*) [...]

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New Hampshire Liberty-Related Bills

Here is a convenient, occasionally updated source on liberty-related legislation that has been enacted into law in New Hampshire this session. There have been a number of changes since the Republican sweep in 2010, some of them despite vetoes from the populist Democratic governor. Most of these changes are minor, but the cumulative effect of [...]

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NH Liberty Forum Report

I’ve recently returned from the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, held February 23-26 in Nashua, NH and sponsored by the Free State Project. The two evening keynote speakers were libertarian free-range farmer Joel Salatin and investor and recent U.S. Senate candidate Peter Schiff. In addition, session speakers included school-choice economist Angela Dills, former Libertarian Pennsylvania gubernatorial [...]

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New Hampshire House of Representatives v. ObamaCare

The NH House passed a resolution today condemning the White House for its infamous contraception rule.  The NH Journal notes that this was a national first:  ”The New Hampshire House of Representatives has thus become the first elected body in America to officially vote to condemn the ruling.”  Although without teeth, this move is still nice to see.  Here is the story: The [...]

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“A decade ago, libertarian activists… hatched a crazy plan to take over New Hampshire… It’s kind of working.”

That’s from the lede of a new story in Mother Jones about the Free State Project, entitled “City on a Quill.” Mother Jones is definitely coming from the left, but the story is meritoriously free of those lazy, paranoid arguments ad Kochum that we’ve seen about Free Staters from The Nation (no, I’m not going [...]

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National Journal on the FSP and NH Primary

I was recently interviewed for a National Journal story, which has just come out, on how the Free State Project may influence the 2012 presidential primary. Pileus also gets a link!

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NH Bill to Criminalize Intrusive TSA Pat-Downs

Free Staters continue to blow minds in the New Hampshire legislature, now with a bill that would define the new pat-down regime at airports as sexual assault. Video story here, text here. An update on that Approval Voting bill: it was killed by the House in a fairly lopsided vote. The sponsors pledge to try [...]

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Will New Hampshire Be the First State to Abolish First-Past-the-Post?

A bill to adopt approval voting has been filed in the N.H. House, and one of the co-sponsors is a member of the relevant committee. The bill would establish approval voting for all state offices and presidential primaries. Approval voting is an electoral system for single-winner elections that allows voters to cast not more than [...]

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New Hampshire election report

Here is a quick summation of last night’s results in state races in New Hampshire. The moderate-to-conservative Democratic governor, John Lynch, won re-election by about a 6-point margin, down from something like a 45-point margin in 2008. The state senate now has a veto-proof Republican majority, overturning the previous Democratic majority. (As of this writing, [...]

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Tomorrow’s Primaries in NY and NH

Tomorrow my current and future states of residence are holding primaries. In New York the Republican gubernatorial contest has generated quite a lot of controversy, even though the nominee is likely to lose to Andrew Cuomo, while I’ve heard almost nothing about the special senatorial contest, even though that nominee has a fair shot at [...]

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Statistical Estimates of the Future Impact of the Free State Project

Given my estimate of the effect of the size of the liberty constituency on freedom, what would be expected to happen to freedom in New Hampshire if the liberty constituency in that state grew?

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The State of the Free State

PorcFest 2010: thoughts on Gary Johnson and the state of play in New Hampshire.

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