I think, for a lot of libertarians or "libertarian~ish" people like myself, you gotta ask: freedom to do hwhat?
A lot of libertarians have their pet causes and glaring exceptions.
Mine are free speech and being pro-life, respectively.
I understand the libertarian position on drugs, but drugs are not my cup of tea. I'm not against the legalization of drugs but it's not my hill to die on. I am not gonna uproot my family to move to Oregon or Portugal, because they have laxer regulations on a hobby that I don't even partake in!
I think all of the US has relatively good free speech. Even in blue states. Moreso than any other "normal" country.
I don't see other libertarian causes being really championed by any other state/country that I would, personally, benefit from...
* Hong Kong WAS nice but not anymore.
* Prospera seems promising but I worry about the future of ZEDEs.
* The UAE has relatively low taxes. But limited free speech. And you better not start a business that competes with a Sheik's business!
* Milei is doing necessary cuts in the size of government in Argentina. But it still has a long way to go. It's getting better. But it's still not great again. If I lived there, I fear I wouldn't make much money, or, at least, would not be able to afford a decent standard of living.
* Tanzania had lax Covid restrictions, but incomes are low and Covid is over, anyway. Besides, mostly, my life was back to normal after I got fully vaxxed in July 2021. It sucked for the unvaxxed. But, not my hill to die on.
I noticed a pattern... Given the opportunity, I am willing to uproot my life to move somewhere where MY rights are not being trampled. But, for others, like drug aficionados, the pre-born and the unvaxxed, I will use my voice to fight for their rights in my current jurisdiction, but I will not necessarily move to somewhere where their rights are not being trampled, just in solidarity with them.
I'm thinking a lot of my own life, here. I am mindful of my privacy so bare with me, if I'm a lil cryptic with some of my details.
I live on the border between 2 provinces in Canada. I work in the public sector. It is one of the biggest employers in my area and I have a decent job with them. I live in the province with lower taxes. One of my employees lives in the high-tax province and I keep trynna convince him to come to the "dark side". Haha. But that province also has cheaper electricity, car insurance, water and housing, along with subsidized day care. Part of the reason the low-tax province has lower taxes is because of more fiscal restraint. We don't really have subsidized day care, for example. But part of the reason is simply cause we have more public debt per capita.
If my employee had 3 kids, electric heating, 2 cars, a working wife and a house, maybe I would tell him to stay in the high-tax province, cause it would be cheaper for him. I'd imagine some of y'all would be like: "NO! You should always choose the province with lower taxes/less government out of principle!" But isn't libertarianism all about letting individuals pursue their own self-interest is better? Are you really gonna blame someone for pursuing their own self-interest?
Could I move to an even lower tax province? Yea, sure. But the housing is not much cheaper, if cheaper at all. The jobs in my field are not super plentiful and the weather is prolly worse.
I recently married an American who lives in the Bay Area. We decided that I would join her in the US, rather than the other way around. I think there are plenty of job opportunities in the Bay Area and they pay well. Especially considering that the low value of the Canadian Dollar. Also, the US is generally more free than Canada. Especially hwhen it comes to free speech. Canada is over-doing it with "Bubble Zones". It started with abortion clinics but it's gotten really out of hand. Yes, I am aware free speech isn't perfect in the US, either. But Americans value free speech more. Especially, in the long term, I see the US as having MUCH more free speech than Canada. Canadians don't value free speech the way Americans do. They like their bubble zone laws. I don't much like my fellow Canadians.
If I could, I would prefer to live in Austin: lower taxes, cheaper houses and pro-life. But my wife is kinda settled in the Bay Area and wants to stay there. I want us to, at least, visit Texas. But come to think of it maybe the wages are that much higher in the Bay Area to compensate for the higher taxes and maybe it's good to live in a "pro-choice" state. More people who need their minds changed!
I wouldn't really live in Florida. It seems like hwhere old people go to die. And it doesn't necessarily strike me as "free" just anti-woke. Like didn't Governor De Santis make it illegal for cruise lines to ask for proof of vaccination? That doesn't sound very free market to me! I think a lot of cruise passengers are elderly and they would be afraid of going cruising again in the early post-vaxx days. It should be up to companies and consumers to choose vaxx policies. Not the government!
I wouldn't wanna live in New Hampshire. It's almost as cold as Canada. If I could live in the US, living in a warmer climate is much more important to me than hwhat? Being able to ride a motorcycle without a helmet? I don't even ride motorcycles!
I think Prospera looks promising. But I'd have to get a job there and convince the Mrs. So far, I've convinced her to visit there with me. I think some of their promotional videos featured a pre-existing luxury on Roatan that joined them cause of the lower taxes. I think that helped! Haha.
I got so much more to say, but I gotta get back to work!
Like most who love liberty, I make trade-offs between liberty and other values. I would prefer to live in Florida rather than the San Francisco Bay Area, all else being equal. But my son and my 3 grandsons live in the Bay Area, so I moved here to be near them. I now live 7 miles from them, and see my grandsons about twice a week instead of 3 or 4 times a year. My son also loves liberty, but he received a great job offer in the Bay Area in 2016 that was too good to turn down, and he still works for that firm. The main infringements on liberty in the Bay Area are high tax rates. Otherwise, the local and state governments pretty much leave you alone, unless, of course, you are a business owner, which I am not.
"...you can easily raise your relative income by moving to a poorer neighborhood, state, or country."
I'm not sure that's really true. The vast majority of people are employed close to where they live, and wages correlate quite closely to how poor or rich a state or country is. An employee making $100k in California can't move to Alabama or Panama and still make 100k doing the same job in the new location. The only people who *could* move to a poorer place and keep the same income are work-from-homers and digital nomads... and in fact work-from-homers DO seek out cheaper (i.e. poorer) neighbourhoods, and digital nomads DO seek out cheaper (i.e. poorer) countries.
"Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Not even close. Cooperation is civilized; coercion is tyranny. Taxes are to civilization as a bullet is to cooperation.
Civilized societies have strong governments. Strong governments tend to tax because they are strong.
You can get to a tax rate of 0% in anarchy, but nobody wants to live in anarchy.
Excepting weird city states and other outliers (which aren't scalable), every single large OECD country spends like 40-55% of GDP on government. That's the price of living in a civilized society. Not because the spending makes society civilized, but because civilized societies are capable of forcing those taxes out of people.
If that were so, then Nazi Germany, the USSR, and every other dictatorship would count as civilized. That's what Holmes was saying, that taxes are the hallmark of civilization. He is wrong. Taxes are coercion and coercion is the hallmark of governments, not civilization. Did the Northwest territories turn from uncivilized to civilized the moment the first states were formed? Did the Western frontier?
People who intrinsically value freedom also values diversity. Diversity in culture, spirituality, politics, background, hobbies, etc. The Bay Area is incredibly diverse, and the tech sector is *relatively* unregulated. I can easily see the Bay Area and Sillican Valley specifically being attractive to libertarians.
Good point! I like to experience different cuisines. In my area, sure, we've got Chinese, Indian and Lebanese. But my experience in the Bay Area: They've got ALL the Asians: Mongolians, Thai, Cambodian, etc. so there's much more variety!
Perhaps, but then I wonder if they truly valued liberty. As John Milton said, "Only good men love freedom heartily. Others love not freedom, but license." If they were only interested in freedom for themselves, they weren't truly believers in freedom. If they were interested in universal freedom, they should value the diversity that naturally follows from that.
I'm not convinced. A lot of people in this world stay put and just keep on grumbling, myself included. I do not blame them.
Staying put doesn't mean you voted with your feet. It just means, you considered trade-offs. The costs of moving to another country, in terms of losing friends, connections, opportunities and money, are very high. Legal migration is often near impossible.
The benefits of moving are dubious too. Usually you trade one freedom for another. When I moved from France to the US, I did not experience a sudden expansion of my "freedom". Cars were cheaper, but driving more was not more freedom to me. Driving now felt compulsory. Lots of stuff I used to have and love in France wasn't available, and I found society paranoid and aggressive in the US. The very idea that cities have "no go zones" in the US, "bad areas of town" ... I mean where is the freedom in that? I chuckle when I consider that living in Singapore, as I do now, provides me with greater subjective freedom in many dimensions than I would have in the US. That now includes freedom of speech - Singapore does not require you to lay bare your social media accounts upon entry.
I wish for a better world with genuinely free movement of people, goods, services, capital, and ideas, across borders. I wish borders did not exist. But they do, and the Zeitgeist is to completely shut off any movement of any of the above, so that everyone may live in a smaller prison cell. I don't see how any of this will improve within my lifetime and it makes me incredibly sad.
For me, relocation is ultimately about having access to cutting edge frontier science. Eventually the American military will no longer be first place and by then it will be too late to do anything about it. I want to go where there is stability, security and prosperity. And that will always be whichever area is the freest and has the most technological innovation.
I still think the FSP choosing New Hampshire was a big mistake. Wyoming was the obvious choice. For one thing, the population in Wyoming is about 40% of New Hampshire's, so much easier to get elected and influence politics.
I might have considered moving if Wyoming had been chosen. I did eventually end up nearby, in northern Colorado.
Considering the cato/fraser human freedom index, The US is not the mot libertarian country in the world, far from it. Switzerland, nothern european countries, Australia, Canada etc...are higher in terms of liberty.
There are other ways to care about liberty besides running away from relatively nasty states to settle in less nasty states. Statism is only a subset of all the forms of aggression that exist in the world, and running away from aggressors is only a subset of the various methods available for minimizing the impacts of aggression upon oneself and upon those you care about. In many situations, running away is not likely to be particularly effective in offering a permanent escape from the ravages of statism.
Moreover, caring about liberty is only one dimension of the broader struggle to achieve and make the most of one's personal moral and intellectual autonomy. There's not much point in moving to someplace that is a bit more free if one has to give up too much of all the other things and relationships that makes one's life worth living. It's only in a ridiculous Randian "Galt's Gulch" fantasy that you can effortlessly achieve a fulfilling, prosperous life with a tiny band of like-minded people in an isolated wilderness setting.
I have read this two, or three times in the last couple of days. I've been involved with the LP for the last 45 years. I don't want to move to a more Libertarian place, but I'd like to make the place I live more libertarian. It might help if the message was consistent nationwide. That would probably require getting an organization to provide summaries on issues that could be copied from a web site and printed locally for distribution. Six people putting in 2 hours each a week could get a lot done.. Then if we had a group sending letters to their congress people, or to the media someone might pick up on an issue and get the idea things need to change. Thank you.
I think, for a lot of libertarians or "libertarian~ish" people like myself, you gotta ask: freedom to do hwhat?
A lot of libertarians have their pet causes and glaring exceptions.
Mine are free speech and being pro-life, respectively.
I understand the libertarian position on drugs, but drugs are not my cup of tea. I'm not against the legalization of drugs but it's not my hill to die on. I am not gonna uproot my family to move to Oregon or Portugal, because they have laxer regulations on a hobby that I don't even partake in!
I think all of the US has relatively good free speech. Even in blue states. Moreso than any other "normal" country.
I don't see other libertarian causes being really championed by any other state/country that I would, personally, benefit from...
* Hong Kong WAS nice but not anymore.
* Prospera seems promising but I worry about the future of ZEDEs.
* The UAE has relatively low taxes. But limited free speech. And you better not start a business that competes with a Sheik's business!
* Milei is doing necessary cuts in the size of government in Argentina. But it still has a long way to go. It's getting better. But it's still not great again. If I lived there, I fear I wouldn't make much money, or, at least, would not be able to afford a decent standard of living.
* Tanzania had lax Covid restrictions, but incomes are low and Covid is over, anyway. Besides, mostly, my life was back to normal after I got fully vaxxed in July 2021. It sucked for the unvaxxed. But, not my hill to die on.
I noticed a pattern... Given the opportunity, I am willing to uproot my life to move somewhere where MY rights are not being trampled. But, for others, like drug aficionados, the pre-born and the unvaxxed, I will use my voice to fight for their rights in my current jurisdiction, but I will not necessarily move to somewhere where their rights are not being trampled, just in solidarity with them.
I'm thinking a lot of my own life, here. I am mindful of my privacy so bare with me, if I'm a lil cryptic with some of my details.
I live on the border between 2 provinces in Canada. I work in the public sector. It is one of the biggest employers in my area and I have a decent job with them. I live in the province with lower taxes. One of my employees lives in the high-tax province and I keep trynna convince him to come to the "dark side". Haha. But that province also has cheaper electricity, car insurance, water and housing, along with subsidized day care. Part of the reason the low-tax province has lower taxes is because of more fiscal restraint. We don't really have subsidized day care, for example. But part of the reason is simply cause we have more public debt per capita.
If my employee had 3 kids, electric heating, 2 cars, a working wife and a house, maybe I would tell him to stay in the high-tax province, cause it would be cheaper for him. I'd imagine some of y'all would be like: "NO! You should always choose the province with lower taxes/less government out of principle!" But isn't libertarianism all about letting individuals pursue their own self-interest is better? Are you really gonna blame someone for pursuing their own self-interest?
Could I move to an even lower tax province? Yea, sure. But the housing is not much cheaper, if cheaper at all. The jobs in my field are not super plentiful and the weather is prolly worse.
I recently married an American who lives in the Bay Area. We decided that I would join her in the US, rather than the other way around. I think there are plenty of job opportunities in the Bay Area and they pay well. Especially considering that the low value of the Canadian Dollar. Also, the US is generally more free than Canada. Especially hwhen it comes to free speech. Canada is over-doing it with "Bubble Zones". It started with abortion clinics but it's gotten really out of hand. Yes, I am aware free speech isn't perfect in the US, either. But Americans value free speech more. Especially, in the long term, I see the US as having MUCH more free speech than Canada. Canadians don't value free speech the way Americans do. They like their bubble zone laws. I don't much like my fellow Canadians.
If I could, I would prefer to live in Austin: lower taxes, cheaper houses and pro-life. But my wife is kinda settled in the Bay Area and wants to stay there. I want us to, at least, visit Texas. But come to think of it maybe the wages are that much higher in the Bay Area to compensate for the higher taxes and maybe it's good to live in a "pro-choice" state. More people who need their minds changed!
I wouldn't really live in Florida. It seems like hwhere old people go to die. And it doesn't necessarily strike me as "free" just anti-woke. Like didn't Governor De Santis make it illegal for cruise lines to ask for proof of vaccination? That doesn't sound very free market to me! I think a lot of cruise passengers are elderly and they would be afraid of going cruising again in the early post-vaxx days. It should be up to companies and consumers to choose vaxx policies. Not the government!
I wouldn't wanna live in New Hampshire. It's almost as cold as Canada. If I could live in the US, living in a warmer climate is much more important to me than hwhat? Being able to ride a motorcycle without a helmet? I don't even ride motorcycles!
I think Prospera looks promising. But I'd have to get a job there and convince the Mrs. So far, I've convinced her to visit there with me. I think some of their promotional videos featured a pre-existing luxury on Roatan that joined them cause of the lower taxes. I think that helped! Haha.
I got so much more to say, but I gotta get back to work!
Like most who love liberty, I make trade-offs between liberty and other values. I would prefer to live in Florida rather than the San Francisco Bay Area, all else being equal. But my son and my 3 grandsons live in the Bay Area, so I moved here to be near them. I now live 7 miles from them, and see my grandsons about twice a week instead of 3 or 4 times a year. My son also loves liberty, but he received a great job offer in the Bay Area in 2016 that was too good to turn down, and he still works for that firm. The main infringements on liberty in the Bay Area are high tax rates. Otherwise, the local and state governments pretty much leave you alone, unless, of course, you are a business owner, which I am not.
"...you can easily raise your relative income by moving to a poorer neighborhood, state, or country."
I'm not sure that's really true. The vast majority of people are employed close to where they live, and wages correlate quite closely to how poor or rich a state or country is. An employee making $100k in California can't move to Alabama or Panama and still make 100k doing the same job in the new location. The only people who *could* move to a poorer place and keep the same income are work-from-homers and digital nomads... and in fact work-from-homers DO seek out cheaper (i.e. poorer) neighbourhoods, and digital nomads DO seek out cheaper (i.e. poorer) countries.
While it is probably not entirely fair, I work on the general premise that anything Oliver Wendell Holmes says is wrong.
Even when he gets things right (Federal Baseball Club v National League), he gets them right for the wrong reason.
Love this comment.
"Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Not even close. Cooperation is civilized; coercion is tyranny. Taxes are to civilization as a bullet is to cooperation.
I'd put it differently.
Civilized societies have strong governments. Strong governments tend to tax because they are strong.
You can get to a tax rate of 0% in anarchy, but nobody wants to live in anarchy.
Excepting weird city states and other outliers (which aren't scalable), every single large OECD country spends like 40-55% of GDP on government. That's the price of living in a civilized society. Not because the spending makes society civilized, but because civilized societies are capable of forcing those taxes out of people.
If that were so, then Nazi Germany, the USSR, and every other dictatorship would count as civilized. That's what Holmes was saying, that taxes are the hallmark of civilization. He is wrong. Taxes are coercion and coercion is the hallmark of governments, not civilization. Did the Northwest territories turn from uncivilized to civilized the moment the first states were formed? Did the Western frontier?
People who intrinsically value freedom also values diversity. Diversity in culture, spirituality, politics, background, hobbies, etc. The Bay Area is incredibly diverse, and the tech sector is *relatively* unregulated. I can easily see the Bay Area and Sillican Valley specifically being attractive to libertarians.
Good point! I like to experience different cuisines. In my area, sure, we've got Chinese, Indian and Lebanese. But my experience in the Bay Area: They've got ALL the Asians: Mongolians, Thai, Cambodian, etc. so there's much more variety!
I don't think the Green Mountain Boys valued "diversity", though they were the type to believe in liberty or death.
Perhaps, but then I wonder if they truly valued liberty. As John Milton said, "Only good men love freedom heartily. Others love not freedom, but license." If they were only interested in freedom for themselves, they weren't truly believers in freedom. If they were interested in universal freedom, they should value the diversity that naturally follows from that.
I'm not convinced. A lot of people in this world stay put and just keep on grumbling, myself included. I do not blame them.
Staying put doesn't mean you voted with your feet. It just means, you considered trade-offs. The costs of moving to another country, in terms of losing friends, connections, opportunities and money, are very high. Legal migration is often near impossible.
The benefits of moving are dubious too. Usually you trade one freedom for another. When I moved from France to the US, I did not experience a sudden expansion of my "freedom". Cars were cheaper, but driving more was not more freedom to me. Driving now felt compulsory. Lots of stuff I used to have and love in France wasn't available, and I found society paranoid and aggressive in the US. The very idea that cities have "no go zones" in the US, "bad areas of town" ... I mean where is the freedom in that? I chuckle when I consider that living in Singapore, as I do now, provides me with greater subjective freedom in many dimensions than I would have in the US. That now includes freedom of speech - Singapore does not require you to lay bare your social media accounts upon entry.
I wish for a better world with genuinely free movement of people, goods, services, capital, and ideas, across borders. I wish borders did not exist. But they do, and the Zeitgeist is to completely shut off any movement of any of the above, so that everyone may live in a smaller prison cell. I don't see how any of this will improve within my lifetime and it makes me incredibly sad.
For me, relocation is ultimately about having access to cutting edge frontier science. Eventually the American military will no longer be first place and by then it will be too late to do anything about it. I want to go where there is stability, security and prosperity. And that will always be whichever area is the freest and has the most technological innovation.
I still think the FSP choosing New Hampshire was a big mistake. Wyoming was the obvious choice. For one thing, the population in Wyoming is about 40% of New Hampshire's, so much easier to get elected and influence politics.
I might have considered moving if Wyoming had been chosen. I did eventually end up nearby, in northern Colorado.
It seems obvious to me that in addition to freedom they wanted jobs near a major metropolitan area (Boston).
Why not both?
Wyoming came in 2nd when they voted via the Condorcet method.
People care about *other people's* relative income and equality.
They don't care much about their own.
Except libertarians, who don't really care much about other people's choices.
--Dave (Atkinson NH)
Considering the cato/fraser human freedom index, The US is not the mot libertarian country in the world, far from it. Switzerland, nothern european countries, Australia, Canada etc...are higher in terms of liberty.
There are other ways to care about liberty besides running away from relatively nasty states to settle in less nasty states. Statism is only a subset of all the forms of aggression that exist in the world, and running away from aggressors is only a subset of the various methods available for minimizing the impacts of aggression upon oneself and upon those you care about. In many situations, running away is not likely to be particularly effective in offering a permanent escape from the ravages of statism.
Moreover, caring about liberty is only one dimension of the broader struggle to achieve and make the most of one's personal moral and intellectual autonomy. There's not much point in moving to someplace that is a bit more free if one has to give up too much of all the other things and relationships that makes one's life worth living. It's only in a ridiculous Randian "Galt's Gulch" fantasy that you can effortlessly achieve a fulfilling, prosperous life with a tiny band of like-minded people in an isolated wilderness setting.
Bryan endorses liberty by having a government job near DC and living in a gated single family community that won’t build new housing!
I left NOVA and moved to Florida. Freedom from being around people like Bryan was a huge part of the deal!
"Doesn’t that mean that I value my career and family harmony more than a little extra liberty? It does."
If only there were a field of study that emphasized tradeoffs.
I have read this two, or three times in the last couple of days. I've been involved with the LP for the last 45 years. I don't want to move to a more Libertarian place, but I'd like to make the place I live more libertarian. It might help if the message was consistent nationwide. That would probably require getting an organization to provide summaries on issues that could be copied from a web site and printed locally for distribution. Six people putting in 2 hours each a week could get a lot done.. Then if we had a group sending letters to their congress people, or to the media someone might pick up on an issue and get the idea things need to change. Thank you.
While you may not be ready to move to New Hampshire, why not come to Porcfest one of these years?