One of the great things about my chosen home of New Hampshire—like a majority of people in the state, it’s not where I grew up—is the extraordinary number of friends and people I get to visit and talk to (thank you RLCNH and GraniteGrok.com and NH GOP).
One such conversation recently was a true eye-opener. Scary even….
You see, there’s this young entrepreneur I’ve met who lives in New Hampshire. She’s a Freestater, of course. And she’s got an idea. A big idea. That will make money. Lots of money…if she can pull it off. She explained it to me over a beer at a well-known libertarian watering-hole in the Free State of New Hampshire recently.
“Hmmmm,” I mused. “You know…that just might actually work. If you get into the market timely…and if you have the right marketing program…and if you gather the right operations team around you.” She nodded happily. “No problemo. I’m already lining them up. Got a patent lawyer too.”
“If you make it happen,” I said, nodding, “and if it all works just right…you’re talking about a boatload of money. You know that, right?”
“Oh, the money’s not important,” she said. “Money’s just money. I’ve had lots of it before, in California. Then lost it, made it again, et cetera. The big personal rush is to create something new. Something in the marketplace that helps people, that serves them up what they want and can use—like capitalism usually does—and that sends us all further up the spiral of creativity!”
“You’re scaring me, babe,” I said, taking another big sip of an excellent summertime beer.
“No, really,” she said. “It won’t be the money at all. We’re creating something here in New Hampshire, and it’s not just the politics of liberty and freedom. It’s more than that….”
“You’re still scaring me,” I said dryly, reach for my mug of great ale. “If you do it right, and it hits the market just right, you could be talking about billions of dollars…you realize that right?”
She shrugged! The little witch shrugged at me!
“You know,” she said, “I’ve checked on it, and for about a billion dollars I could have a tower built. It would be in New Hampshire. We’d have to check the flight paths of the airlines and military, but I’m sure there’s a spot for it.”
“A tower?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“Yeah, a tower. I’ll make it one mile high. It’ll be anchored in solid New Hampshire granite bedrock…and it will be the tallest building in the world. And…” Her eyes got a kind of fiery, blazing look in them. “…it will have a torch on the top.” She paused, took a drink of her own beer, then… “You’ll be able to see the Torch of Freedom from Maine to Lowell, Massachusetts, and west over into central Vermont. It’ll be impressive.”
“Now you’re really worrying me,” I said. “You can’t go around building mile-high buildings and writing checks for a billion dollars at a pop.”
She laughed. “I can—I will—if this works and I become a zillionaire.”
“Why the torch?” I said.
“Wyatt’s torch,” she answered. “Like in Atlas Shrugged. The torch of freedom, shining out from what could turn out to be the only remaining beacon of freedom in America, the state of New Hampshire.”
“Sheesh,” I said, smiling. “You nutcase Freestaters.”
“Hah!” she snorted. “I’ve already run my invention by the guy who’s going to be my main partner in the deal. He says it’ll work. He was born and raised in New Hampshire.”
She paused and looked at me very seriously, her eyes boring into mine, her voice rising. “If we keep on creating the small-government, low-tax, free-minded capitalist culture in this state that we have been, we will build the tower of freedom…we will bypass the science-killers at the FDA and other federal bureaucracies…we will find a cure for AIDS, we will extend our average lifespans by decades…and we will cure cancer. All of it.”
She slammed down her fist on the table for emphasis.
I nodded, thinking…. Damn. She and her business partner, and me and the Groksters at GraniteGrok.coms, and the RLCNH activists, and the 2nd Amendment people, and the Tea Party activists, and the tax-fighters at CNHT, and the the think-tank people, and the education reformers, and the many, many others who are yet to move to New Hampshire. You know…we might just pull it off. With businessmen and visionaries and entrepreneurs and engineers and architects and working people from all walks of life who believe in capitalism and freedom…we can do it. In fact…we will.