And So Should You, Whether You Agree With It or Not
Last week, roughly a hundred protesters gathered at the New Hampshire State House to denounce the Free State Project. Their complaints were familiar: the FSP is “radical,” its participants are outsiders bent on “dismantling” public education, and their influence on state politics is illegitimate. Similar protests, op-eds, and watchdog campaigns have recurred for years. The criticisms are always delivered with the confidence of people who believe they are defending civilization itself against barbarians at the gate.
They are not. They are making arguments that three of the most important thinkers in the Anglo-American tradition of liberty would have recognized immediately and rejected.
Consider the “outsider” charge first. John Stuart Mill devoted a substantial portion of his 1859 masterwork On Liberty to precisely this kind of social coercion. He warned against “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling,” which seeks to impose its own ideas as rules of conduct on dissenters, to prevent the formation of “any individuality not in harmony with its ways.” Mill did not merely tolerate eccentricity. He celebrated it. The amount of eccentricity in a society, he argued, “has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.” A society that treats nonconformity as a threat is a society in intellectual decline.
The Free State Project is, in Mill’s terms, an experiment in living. People who share a broadly libertarian philosophy choose to concentrate in a state whose culture already leans toward independence. They run for office, start businesses, build communities, and participate in civic life. Nobody is compelled to join or agree with them. The experiment succeeds or fails on its merits, visible to all. Mill argued that “there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically.” That is all the FSP proposes to do.
The deeper objection is that the FSP’s philosophy is itself dangerous: that limited government, school choice, and personal autonomy amount to “dismantling” the institutions communities need. This objection assumes that existing government programs represent the natural order of things and that questioning them is inherently destructive.
Lysander Spooner, the great nineteenth-century constitutional radical, challenged exactly this assumption. In his early work, he argued that the right to contract and associate freely “is a natural, inherent, inalienable right” that exists “antecedently to, and independently of, any positive or municipal law.” By 1870, in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, he had followed the logic further: the Constitution itself, he argued, “has no inherent authority or obligation,” because nobody alive has ever signed it. This sounds extreme until you realize it is simply contract law applied consistently. The courts that derive their authority from the Constitution would reject any other unsigned document placed before them.
Spooner’s most relevant argument concerns voting. He observed that casting a ballot cannot be taken as consent to be governed, because the voter “finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist.” Using the ballot is not voluntary agreement; it is self-defense. When critics accuse Free Staters of “taking over” by winning elections, they are objecting to the only peaceful recourse available to people who find themselves governed without their genuine consent. The FSP’s members do not claim the right to rule others. They claim the right to reduce the scope of rule over everyone, including themselves. And they do so in the most transparent way imaginable: by signing a public statement of intent, moving openly, and running for office under their own names.
Albert Jay Nock, writing in the 1930s and ’40s, added a framework that makes sense of the entire controversy. He distinguished between “social power” and “State power.” Social power is everything that individuals and voluntary associations accomplish through cooperation, commerce, charity, and persuasion. State power is what the government accomplishes through compulsion. They exist in inverse proportion. Every function the State assumes removes it from the domain of voluntary action. Every critic who demands more state spending on education, more regulatory authority over land use, and more government direction of healthcare is simultaneously demanding a larger apparatus of compulsion and trusting that this apparatus will always be controlled by people who share their values. History, as Nock understood, offers no support for this trust. He quoted Jefferson’s principle: “in proportion as you give the State power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.”
Nock also wrote an essay called “Isaiah’s Job” that could serve as the Free State Project’s intellectual charter. He argued that the prophet’s true audience is not the masses, who will never listen, but the “Remnant” — a scattered minority who possess the intellectual force and moral character to apprehend and uphold the principles of a free society. The Remnant, Nock said, “are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up.” The Free State Project did not create such people. It gave them an address.
What about Grafton and the bears? The Free Town Project was a splinter effort, not the FSP. It concentrated on one tiny town, ended in 2016, and its failures were real. But Mill’s harm principle, properly applied, distinguishes between restraining specific harmful conduct (unsecured garbage, defunded fire services) and condemning an entire philosophy by its most colorful disaster. You can hold a negligent neighbor accountable without concluding that the idea of limited government causes bear attacks.
What about secession? Spooner would have observed that the right of exit from any political arrangement is simply the mirror image of the requirement of consent for entry. A union that permits no questioning of its terms is not a voluntary association. But the question is practically moot: the FSP operates entirely within the existing constitutional framework, and the New Hampshire House rejected a secession amendment 323-13. The intellectual question matters only because the hysteria surrounding it reveals the deepest assumption of the anti-FSP position: that the existing political order is not merely useful but sacred, and that questioning it is not merely impractical but immoral.
Mill, Spooner, and Nock would all have rejected this assumption. The right to move freely, to organize openly around shared principles, to run for office and advocate for limited government, is not a privilege that incumbent residents may revoke. It is the foundation of the free society that New Hampshire’s own motto proclaims.
“Live Free or Die” is either a principle or a bumper sticker. The Free State Project treats it as a principle. That this is controversial tells us more about the condition of our political culture than about the Free State Project itself.
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Disagree, agree, Got Something to Say, We Want to Hear It. Comment or submit Op-Eds to steve@granitegrok.com
