New Hampshire Election Report

While Republicans nationally enjoyed a wave election, Republican federal candidates in New Hampshire underperformed relative to other states. Scott Brown lost very narrowly to incumbent Jeanne Shaheen, dogged throughout the campaign with the "carpetbagger" label. The highly conservative, hawkish Marilinda Garcia also lost in the second congressional district, my district and the more left-leaning one …

New Hampshire Liberty Forum

Registration for the next New Hampshire Liberty Forum is now open. It will take place March 5-8, 2015 in Manchester, N.H. Sponsored by the Free State Project, the Forum is an excellent opportunity to find out what is going on in the burgeoning liberty movement in New Hampshire. At this year's forum, in addition to …

Big Story on the Free State Project

The Sunday edition of the New Hampshire Union-Leader featured a front-page, above-the-fold story on the Free State Project after 10 years in New Hampshire. The story gives a good sense of the wide range of activities, interests, and views of FSP participants who've moved to the state. A taste: "I honestly don't ever advertise it," …

PorcFest Roundup (Updated)

I returned Sunday from the Porcupine Freedom Festival, and here's a selection of PorcFest stories that have come out so far (I will continue updating this post over the next days and weeks - I know New York Times Magazine, Concord Monitor, and The Economist will have stories as well): Union-Leader on the "DIY" theme …

The Statement of Intent Isn’t a Promise

Quite a few libertarians have yet to sign up for the Free State Project. Why not? One reason is that libertarians take their commitments seriously and are therefore reluctant to enter into them lightly. Yet I argue that the FSP's Statement of Intent isn't a commitment or a promise of any kind. It's just a …

“Infiltrating municipal and state elective office to make radical and anarchistic changes”

Are libertarians and classical liberals who move to New Hampshire radical extremist anarchist colonizing subversive treasonous subhuman alien life forms? There's been some nasty politics in Bedford, New Hampshire, where a member of the local political establishment has been hurling epithets on his cable access show at two locals of libertarian views who moved to …

The Latest from New Hampshire and the FSP

Will May has done some really interesting analysis of roll-call voting in the New Hampshire legislature. Recently he did an analysis of where Free Stater legislators fall on the left-right spectrum as revealed by W-NOMINATE data (this procedure places legislators on a dimension of votes as revealed by correlations in voting behavior, not an "objective" …

Free State or Bust

On Saturday I moved with my family to Lebanon, New Hampshire. I am teaching for a year in the Government Department at Dartmouth College. Although my reasons for leaving my tenure-track job at Buffalo were several, I decided last year to apply almost exclusively to jobs in New England so that I could fulfill (early) …

Concord Police Chief Regrets FSP, ONH Language

Mother Jones has followed up on the story reported here about the controversy over the city of Concord's acquisition of a Bearcat armored truck. The Concord police chief has this to say about the language of the grant citing the Free State Project and Occupy New Hampshire as potential sources of domestic terrorism: While the …

Two Stories from NH

Concord, NH is about to acquire a Bearcat "tank" with federal grant money, similar to the one that spurred protests from all walks of society in Keene, NH recently. (One Keene councilman looks back and describes the purchase as a "waste of money.") More disturbing is the fact that the Concord police cited "Free Staters" …

PorcFest Roundup

The Free State Project's Porcupine Freedom Festival was last week, and the media mentions have been trickling in. Unfortunately, I was not able to go due to scheduling conflicts, but the organizers claim, on the basis of 1,500 paid registrants, that over 1,700 people attended (including children). That makes it the biggest PorcFest ever, unsurprising …

Reason on the Free State Project – Achieving Liberty in Our Lifetime, One Step at a Time

Pileus blogger Jason Sorens is the founder of the Free State Project.   Thus our regular readers may be interested in hearing about the progress of his baby in this article in the June edition of Reason magazine.  Like libertarian academics before him such as Milton Friedman, Sorens is both an idealist and a realist - which is part of the reason …

Political Bias at the IRS Likely Deep-Seated

The IRS has been taking flak for its treatment of right-leaning groups seeking recognition as tax-exempt "social welfare" organizations under clause 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. As it happens, I have some personal experience with IRS scrutiny of 501(c)(4) applications. I was on the Board of the Free State Project (FSP) when the FSP …

Imprisoned for “Unlicensed Midwifery,” Fleeing California for New Hampshire

This is a powerful story of injustice and one woman's refusal to stand for it: On August 17th, 2011 Katharine “Katie” McCall, a licensed midwife, was convicted of practicing medicine with out a license for a 2007 birth she assisted as a student. The charge arose from a home birth where Katie's supervising midwife could …

The 2013 New Hampshire Liberty Forum

The 2013 New Hampshire Liberty Forum will be happening in a month. If you want to see about 500 libertarian types overflow the second-largest conference center in the state of New Hampshire, you'll want to be there. I'm impressed with the speaker lineup this year, which reaches beyond traditional libertarian circles: Tom Woods is a …

Can New Hampshire Be the Hong Kong of America?

Pileus's own Jason Sorens is, among many other things, the founder of the Free State Project. The FSP is an initiative that aims to put the convictions of people who talk about individual liberty to the test. Its proposal is based on the straightforward premise that a relatively small number of committed and organized activists can …

From the Department of Backhanded Compliments

Apparently NH lefties are passing around this lengthy condemnation of the Free State Project. Much of it, though, reads like something that could be put in an FSP recruiting brochure: Free Staters in NH are generally intelligent, focused and diligent people, who are sincerely interested in promoting personal responsibility in its broadest meaning. They are …

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 …

Yahoo! News on the FSP

A wry article that captures a good bit of the flavor of an everyday Free Staters' get-together in New Hampshire.

“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 …

Free State Project

As many of our readers may know, fellow Pilei Jason Sorens was the founder of the Free State Project (if you don't know much about it, here is the project's website).  Thus it was with some interest that I opened David Weigel's piece at Slate on the movement that Jason founded. Unfortunately, all I got was a rather …

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!

Libertarianism’s Limits: Political or Theoretical?

At AmCon, James Banks gives his take on the Christopher Beam piece in New York magazine on libertarianism. Like many other critics of the piece, Banks believes Beam focuses too much on the fringes of the movement. However, Banks still argues that libertarianism has inherent "limits": [I]t is still difficult to imagine a robust libertarian …

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?

The State of the Free State

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

Libertarians: How Not to Make Friends and Influence People

Topless protests on school bus routes. I really have no idea what point these people thought they were making, especially since female toplessness is not illegal in Keene, New Hampshire. Full, but begrudging disclosure: These activities are mostly organized by people with ties to the Free State Project, the movement I founded. The libertine, anarchist, …