What is the Free State Project?

On July 21st of 2001, Dr. Jason Sorens wrote a column in the Libertarian Enterprise criticizing the Libertarians movements success was severely lacking. He noted that Libertarians were too few and far between to achieve any kind of real change any time in the next fifty years. He then argued that libertarians needed geographically concentrate their efforts in order to as he said, "achieve liberty in our life times." Just under two months later, The Free State Project was born.

The Free State Project is a political movement which hopes to be able to move 20,000 liberty minded individuals to one state. The idea to move a group of like minded individuals is certainly nothing new. The pilgrims all moved as a group so they could have religious freedom. Once these individuals move to the state they will become political activists which hope to shrink the size of government and take a stand to secure personal liberties for citizens of the state. Members plan on running for political office, working with the state government, campaigning for liberty oriented issues, participating in protest and more in hopes of achieving their political goals.

The mechanics of the program are simple. In August of 2003, the number of members surpassed 5,000 individuals, and then they voted between a number of lesser population generally smaller government states. The options people had to choose from were Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. Eventually New Hampshire was chosen under the Condorcet method. Some individuals were un happy with the choice of state and left the project. After the vote the goal has been to gain 15,000 additional members and then after the number of members surpassed 20,000, the members would have 5 years to move to New Hampshire.

As of yet the Free State Project is struggling for member, as of November of 2006, the free state had only attracted about 7,500 members. At its current rate of membership it would not reach 20,000 members until nearly 2030. In response, the Free State Project started advertising with new methods such as direct mail and blogads. Additionally it created what's called "The First 1000 Program" which hopes to attract 1000 "early movers" between January 1st of 2006 and January 1st of 2007. If the First 1000 Project gains 1,000 members by 2007, they will have two years to move to New Hampshire. As of November of 2006, the first one thousand project had about 580 members.

Some of the members were not happy about the choice of New Hampshire and some members created a project called "Free State West", which has the same goals but wishes to move residents to Wyoming. Another group of Free State Project members wanted to have liberty even faster and created what they call the "Free Town Project." The group focused on Grafton, NH, but failed to win the residence over and the project is inactive.