I was a follower of the Free State Project when it first began.  I never signed up as a committed member (I didn’t want to move), but I followed its progress and spoke about it favorably to others.  I still remember when they were debating which state to choose, and I remember when New Hampshire was ultimately chosen in 2003.

Here we are about 20 years later, and I have to question the progress and the strategy of the whole thing.  To be sure, I was a supporter then, and I still wish everyone well who is doing it.  I am just questioning the effectiveness of it, especially after the last three years.

I followed Harry Browne closely in the early 2000s, and I can recall that someone asked him about the Free State Project.  He questioned the whole strategy and correctly pointed out that many people don’t want to uproot their lives and go to a particular place.  At the same time, he wished them well and hoped that they would make progress.

I am now more in the Harry Browne camp on this subject, especially after COVID hysteria and the recent elections.

The Republican governor in New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, was reelected.  He isn’t a particularly good governor, especially given what happened in 2020 with lockdowns.  It is better than the people of New Hampshire putting in a Democrat, but it’s too bad that the liberty lovers couldn’t get someone from the Republican Party with a more pro-liberty streak in there.

The really disappointing part from the election is in the U.S. House and Senate.  Democrats hold both House seats and both Senate seats from New Hampshire.

I am no fan of most Republicans in Washington DC, but how does the home of the Free State Project manage to elect all Democrats to Congress?  It means a majority of the voters are ok with vaccine mandates, lockdowns, funding for war in Ukraine, student loan bailouts, and all of the other chaos coming out of the Democratic Party.

Perhaps a lot of Free Staters choose not to vote for the lesser of two evils or to vote at all.  At the very least, you would think they would have had some influence by now on the rest of the population.

This was one hesitation I had about the whole thing early on.  I wasn’t sure how residents of New Hampshire would feel about liberty lovers “invading” their state and pushing their politics, even though their ideas consist mostly of getting politics out of people’s lives.

Even worse than the recent elections is the reaction to COVID.  New Hampshire wasn’t particularly bad compared to other states, but it wasn’t great either.  It wasn’t South Dakota.  It wasn’t even Florida, which did have lockdowns in April 2020 but fully opened up in September.

One would think that having a small but decent percentage of the population who consider themselves pro liberty to have had a big impact on lockdowns.  Maybe they did have an impact and it would have been worse than it was.  But it had to have been disappointing for Free Staters to do all that work and end up being locked in their homes because they were deemed non-essential.  New Hampshire should have been showing the way for the rest of the country.

Instead, it was left up to South Dakota (a conservative state) and Florida, which had a governor smart enough and brave enough to quickly realize his errors.  DeSantis had a brief period of acting as dictator, but was heavily opposed by the establishment in later 2020 for daring to open up Florida.

Where was New Hampshire?  Still waiting for advice from Fauci on what they could and couldn’t do?

A Natural Progression to a Free State

In Florida, Ron DeSantis won the governor’s race with nearly 60% of the vote.  Four years ago, he just barely won the election for governor.

This is for a mix of reasons, but most of them point back to COVID hysteria, or lack of COVID hysteria.  Some people who didn’t vote for DeSantis in 2018 (me included) voted for him this time.  It was a reward for being one of the better governors and not locking us down (much).

There are also a lot of people who moved to Florida since that time, and some of them moved specifically to get away from COVID hysteria.  They wanted to go to a state that was open where their kids could go to soccer practice and they probably didn’t have to get a jab to keep their job.

Anyone moving from California to Florida in 2020 or 2021 because of COVID was not going to be bringing leftist politics with them.  It was quite the opposite.

Maybe only 1 or 2 percent of the current population of Florida moved in the last couple of years because of COVID hysteria, but you can bet that almost every one of them voted for DeSantis.

One thing where my mind has changed from 2020 is the importance of politics.  I have long-believed that educating others on the benefits of liberty is the most important thing for libertarians to do, and I still believe that.  However, I underestimated the importance of having the lesser of two evils in office.

DeSantis is not a libertarian, but I realize that Florida would have been in lockdown well into 2021 if he had not won in 2018.  Florida also showed the way for other states to follow.

I also saw how the greater of two evils was bad with Joe Biden as president.  We have gotten vaccine mandates, student loan bailouts, war in Ukraine, and all around chaos.  Courts have struck some of it down.  Biden and company just shrug it off with no consequences and move on to the next dictatorial edict to destroy Western Civilization.

A majority of the people of New Hampshire evidently didn’t care about all of the chaos coming out of Washington DC.  They voted for more chaos.

The people who are part of the Free State Project are generally good people, and they have committed a lot for the cause of advancing liberty.  I don’t live in New Hampshire, so I don’t know what progress has been made.  I would encourage them to do an assessment on the effectiveness of their strategy.

I sincerely wish them well, and I do hope they succeed in bringing much greater liberty to New Hampshire.  With that said, if they don’t see much progress, it may be time to cut their losses and put their efforts somewhere else to greater use.  Maybe they will all have to move to the same city in New Hampshire to have a libertarian town or city within a statist state and a statist country.  Or they could just move to Florida and help make it better.