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Since, we are on this territory, it is clear that we all want less government (to varying degrees) or even no government at all. Me personally, I fall more into the minimal government camp where government basically is just people coming together in direct democracy style to decide on the basic direction of their community and regulate some externalities that the free market is ill equipped to handle well (an extremely bare bones version of the Swiss system).
In any case, we are still a minority unfortunately. It also does not help that there are many shades of grey of libertarianism. So on top of the difficulty of explaining libertarianism to outsiders (i.e. taxpayers with stockholm syndrome, parasites of the system, etc.), libertarians are even divided between themselves.
I'd be interested in your opinions what we can actively do to push the world towards a better system? For example, one difficulty I am facing is that less and less people are actually value generating and are in fact net transfer receivers. It's hard to argue with people who are actively profiting from our current degenerate system.
Anyway, I am curious to hear from you.
this territory is moderated
I think The Free State Project has the right idea: libertarians intentionally moving into the same areas.
Those communities will become more libertarian, which will attract even more libertarians (and repel statists). Then we'll get to see how well our ideas work.
Arguing ideas with cultists doesn't work, but people do notice actual outcomes eventually. When one state has lower taxes and lower crime and lower unemployment, people want to know what they're doing differently.
tl;dr: Vote with your feet
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Was an early mover to the FSP, have since left to free'r pastures and not a suburb of Boston.
It was all a larp, mostly pink-haired shitcoiners to this day... the caricature of the forever poor Libertarian
It was good for one thing though, I got really into Bitcoin as a MoE after watching those shitcoiners sleep on it and use gold grams at farmers markets.
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I think they chose the wrong location. NH is too surrounded by enemy ideologies. If they succeed in making NH better it will get flooded by the surrounding commie statists, rather than more libertarians.
They should have chosen Alaska or Montana, where there's no surrounding hostile population to contend with.
I still think voting with your feet is the right approach. I'm glad you found somewhere even freer than NH.
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I'm actually not convinced its a blue state / red state problem. New Hampshire is a red state, hell even most of massachusetts is... Like most states, there's just a few densely populated cities where gangsters can rig elections to flip it.
You'd want the average old yankee in the granite state in charge of the government over the free-staters, the closer I got to it the more it seemed like a psyop to make Libertarians look like ineffective clowns and legitimize elections- seems to have worked.
There's only one issue Libertarians should care about at this point, other than fixing the money, and that's returning to a land-ownership-based electorate.
Edit: I actually moved to a surrounding area, NH is surrounded by friendlies despite the Bank of London entrenchment that persists in Boston. I did this not to vote with my feet, but because its where I had the most leverage to make myself free, which is different and personal for everyone.
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We may be using the term differently, but that's exactly what I mean by "voting with your feet".
the closer I got to it the more it seemed like a psyop to make Libertarians look like ineffective clowns and legitimize elections
Might it be that many libertarians also happen to be weirdos?
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That's fair use then, I meant in contrast to the thesis of the FSP, which attempted to to DoS local elections as opposed to leading others from a position of strength.
Might it be that many libertarians also happen to be weirdos?
Most Bitcoiners are Libertarians and weird, so it's not that... It may have simply been the cohort of people without ties elsewhere. As a native New England'er it was an inconsequential move for me.
I saw that it recently changed leadership and tone, so it wasn't just me that was put off by it. In hindsight it just seems like it was a bad idea from the start.
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it was a bad idea from the start.
There was a top-down central planning flavor to it that's quite at odds with libertarians and libertarianism. I think it was just an attempt at bottom-up coordination, but that doesn't seem like the way it played out.
I prefer the more organic approach of people just being really conscientious about where they choose to live. Jurisdictions compete for residents, so favorable policies will emerge from our residency choices.
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Yep, the fact that it even needed a change in leadership says it all
May as well just find your niche and join the bigger fight, which is global and spiritual
I've been around so long that I was following FSP when they still hadn't decided which state. It kind of came down to Wyoming and NH. I sort of lost interest after they chose NH.
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I'm pretty sure I voted in those polls. I know I signed the pledge to relocate, which I have yet to follow through on (sorry).
I definitely recall being disappointed by the final location choices.
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Like it! Need to research that more. Currently I only know some places that don’t really seem legit to me. In the end you will always be on the territory of some nation state unless you do sea steading or go to Antarctica 🇦🇶
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42 sats \ 0 replies \ @om 21 May
They are not legit in the sense that they are well-defended against the governments (although Liberland is in principle outside the territory of any nation, it's still attacked). We can't compete with the governments in firepower.
That doesn't mean that concentrating on the government territories is useless. In US that doesn't work because the Feds intervene (see the fate of Ian Freeman). But small countries might not have enough resources to crack down on a large group. See for example https://montelibero.org although they're shitcoiners big time.
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That's right, but it's valuable to reward places that are doing better and punish places that are doing worse. It's also a lot safer to be around people who believe in the non-aggression principle.
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I'm not sure if it's the only way, but educating people and gaining seats in parliament is one path forward. Once there, we can change or repeal laws. The fight has to be fought in their arena. It's a slow process, but I think it's one of the few viable options in the medium to long term.
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Libertarians need coherent messaging.
Currently there are lots of people who claim to be Liertarian but aren't. E.g. conservatives that want big government and more government intervention and more police and less freedom of speech such as book banning. There are neoliberals that are vaguely for less government in all aspects but will never go far enough to question the exsistence of institutions. There are even literal commies and socialists that think anarchism would be socialist.
You can't stop people having these opinions. But you need a clear message where libertarian ideology begins & ends and where there are freeriders
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3 sats \ 9 replies \ @Lux 21 May
Many will not like this, but I want to say it.
Liberty is not freedom.
The term liberty originates from Admiralty Law. Picture a ship in port. The ship crew is at liberty (to visit the area or for leasure..) until the captain sounds the Liberty bell at wich point they are obligated to return to their duties.
More like free range.
Has anyone seen the feet of The Statue of Liberty in NY?
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yep, liberty apply to slaves (and citizens), a privileges by grant, allowing them to head in a district adjacent to a city and in some degree under its municipal jurisdiction.
What about the feet of The Statue of Liberty?
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Asking on status of liberty
Does this mean the other foot is shackled? one is free but the other is not?
you can't tell because the dress
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That's why is the statue of liberty and not the statue of freedom
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21 sats \ 2 replies \ @Lux 22 May
imo it's one shackle unshackled, but as you say, can't be sure because of the dress
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Does this apply to the 50 states ONLY and not it's territories? Wake island, Guam, Puerto Rico, all the citizens there cannot vote for president.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Lux 22 May
It doesn't apply to the several states, only to US Inc, afaik. i'm not yet too familiar with how the territories function. I know DC is a territory - who owns it? ;)
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So one is in chains and the other is freed from chains. The most basic of metaphors when making sculptures.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Lux 21 May
the light bearer unchained
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you might be interested to form a DAO? That might be easier way to include everyone. Everyone can make proposals, vote or not.
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Libertarianism is dead as a political philosophy. Accept that you can still be for the non-aggression principle, wanting to leave others alone and be left alone, but there's no politics in it.
There's too much leverage and interconnected-ness. Everything boils down to whom the guys in the nuclear submarines and direct energy weapons take orders from.
The reason Libertarianism is so ineffective in politics is similar to the inefficacy of gun control. Wanting to opt out of the state is exactly like hating guns, as in it doesn't change the fact that guns exist.
As a Libertarian you're left with only one choice:
Choose which side of that gun you're on, or let your enemy choose for you. The state can only be controlled by state power, so you best cozy up to an era of fascism if the state is to be reformed.
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I think libertarianism is self driven. You can't push someone to realise it by just saying. People are more inclined to state slavery and abide rules just to make life easier. But in return they don't get what they aspired. However, when they realise, they are trapped so badly that they can never come out.
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I for instance "enlisted" in a libertarian political force and gave everything I had for 3 years to make it work. The very first step is to understand that to get there, the effort is such that it will be almost physically painful, and if it's not, be sure as hell that you are not doing enough. And once it's painful, you need to yet again rise your head, take a deep breath and look 3 years head in the distance, 3 years of walking in the dessert following a vision that at times seems to exist in your mind only. That's how we achieved a libertarian government here in Argentina.
After that psychological barrier is unblocked in just enough people, changes start to take place. To get that level of conviction you need to be nearly religious about what you are fighting for. A zealot of sorts.
To help that process, I'm working on a "libertarian manifest", to distill and unify core principles that permit the clarity of mind needed to focus on the objective.