Live free of thee

Live free of thee

Editorial • 07/10/03

What would most of us find wrong with having no income taxes, no regulatory bureaucracies and fewer laws to regulate gun control and drug use?

Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot. It all depends on our own view of reality.

But New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die" is certainly a motto that appeals to the "Free State Project," which advocates these standards. Its members are seeking a place with a warm, cozy political feel that they can call home, and this state is one they're considering.

If at least 20,000 supporters have signed on by 2006, they'll all move to the chosen state Alaska, North and South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Idaho, Maine and Vermont or here and work to establish their own version of a citizen non-government in that state, working as a newly viable political force. You know the big fish/small pond scenario. The concept works. Look what it's done for Salt Lake City and the state of Utah.

Freedom from government, except where it's needed to protect life, liberty and property, is the basis of the "Free Staters" movement. Proponents hope to resettle in an independent-minded state with a "pro-liberty" culture, jobs, coastal access and a lack of dependence on federal funding.

New Hampshire, for better or worse, welcomes rugged individualism. But people most likely won't open their arms to welcome a political interest group with ambitions of controlling a state that's fiercely proud of its own differences.

There's a distasteful artificiality to this concept. Would the proud people of New Hampshire accept a self-interested group albeit one devoted to independent living and thinking when it's staking out a territory for political control and thereby threatening the independence of people here who don't happen to agree with them?

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