Free State Observer

On Saturday, Nov. 15, 2008, Manchester New Hampshire played host to the Third Annual North American Secessionist Convention. This event, organized and sponsored each year by the Middlebury Institute, brings together delegates of secessionist groups from throughout North America to exchange ideas, engage in networking, and promote the idea of secession to attendees and the general public. Attendance is free, and delegates are treated to a closing banquet, courtesy of the Middlebury Institute.

The convention was held at the Radisson Hotel in downtown Manchester. The inaugural event took place in Burlington, VT in 2006, and last year’s event was held in Chattanooga, TN. Kirkpatrick Sale, director of the Middlebury Institute and organizer of the annual event, makes a point of referring to it as a *convention*, not a conference, because its attendees are delegates of various organizations, just as the First and Second Constitutional Conventions of what would become the USA were attended by representatives of various states and territories. The Middlebury Institute focuses on the study of separatism, secession and self-determination.

The convention began promptly at 9:00AM with a presentation by Ku Kuakahi, delegate from the Kingdom of Hawaii. The KoH doesn’t seek to secede from the U.S., as the kingdom never voluntarily joined the U.S. in the first place, but rather was forcibly annexed in 1893. The KoH seeks to regain its independence, to be recognized as an independent nation by the global community of nation-states, and to reinstitute its traditional constitutional monarchy.

Kai Landau of the Hawaiian Embassy also spoke about the political situation in Hawaii. The Hawaiian Embassy pursues a strategy of running a shadow government in parallel with the existing U.S. government. It has its own Prime Minister and courts, and members have contested land ownership, attempting to restore land to its rightful owners from prior to annexation. Members have also challenged driver’s license regulations in court.

The next speaker, Larry Kilgore, ran for the U.S. Senate as a Texas Republican on an openly secessionist platform, garnering 19% of the vote in the party primary. This was a significant improvement over a prior run for governor of Texas, also on a secessionist platform, in which Kilgore claimed 9% of the vote. If elected, Kilgore will request permission from the federal government for Texas to peacefully secede from the Union. If the request is refused, Kilgore intends to rely on the international court of public opinion to further his cause; he opposes any use of violence. More information can be found at http://www.texassecession.com/

Keith Humphrey spoke on behalf of the organization Christian Exodus. Originally founded as a plan to encourage Christians to move to the state of South Carolina in order to build up a large enough number to have political clout, the group has since expanded its reach into Idaho and Panama. Approximately 1500 people have signed up so far, and dozens of families have already relocated. C.E. focuses on independence at the family level, promoting personal secession by “getting off the grid”, home-birthing and not registering newborns with the government, local agriculture, home businesses, and alternative currencies. There is no central organization; families that have relocated operate autonomously.

Next on the agenda was Cesidio Tallini, governor of Independent Long Island. ILI is made up of Queens, Nassau, Suffolk and King Counties in New York, as well as a small island in the Pacific. Brooklyn, NY is its capital. Founded in Aug. 2007, the independent nation currently has 16 registered citizens, to which it issues its own passports.

Tom Moore spoke on behalf of both the Southern National Congress and the League of the South. The LoS is a broadbased organization promoting southern independence and publishes its own newspaper, the Free Magnolia. Members of the LoS emphasize self-sufficiency and local food production.

The Southern National Congress, founded in 2004, serves as a forum for all southern states to express their grievances with the federal government; it’s modelled on the 1st and 2nd Continental Congresses. It promotes the concept of withholding consent. The SNC will be holding its first Congressional meeting Dec. 5 - 7, 2008 in Hendersonville, NC. 120 delegates from all thirteen southern states and Maryland are expected to attend. Moore discussed some successful historical precedents for peaceful secession from imperial control, including India, Ireland and Scotland.

The Alaskan Independence Party was represented by Dexter Clark, its Vice-Chair (Clark’s wife, Lynette, is party Chair). Clark issued a formal apology for unwittingly playing a role in the public furor that ensued when inaccurate stories of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin circulated in the recent Presidential campaign. Apparently, Clark had erroneously stated at a previous convention that Sarah Palin had been a member, and his speech was recorded and posted on YouTube. Political hacks then went so far as to create a false website, claiming to represent the AIP, and prominently featuring Sarah Palin on its homepage. Clark wished to set the record straight that Sarah Palin has never been a member of the AIP, although she has addressed the organization and her husband, Todd, was a member for seven years. Convention attendees were shown a recording of a CNN “expose” on the AIP, in which a reporter visited the Clarks at their home in Fairbanks and a political analyst commented on the party’s official platform and public statements. He proclaimed it “radical”, but “legitimate”.

The AIP is a state-level political party that runs candidates for office and promotes the idea of Alaskan independence with a minimal government. In the recent election, some AIP candidates received more than 4% of the vote, thus deciding the outcome of battles between the two major parties.

Thomas Naylor spoke on behalf of several secessionist organizations from the state of Vermont. Naylor has been involved with the Vermont secession movement for five years, and described it as a loose alliance of four separate organizations: the Second Vermont Republic, the Vermont Commons, Free Vermont and the Green Mountain Brigade. While one of the best organized secessionist movements in North America, 2VR has suffered from public attacks, some anonymous, falsely linking it to white supremacist organizations. Naylor refutes any such claims. The Vermont legislature reportedly contains several closet secessionists, but none who are willing to go public yet. 2VR held its second statewide convention earlier this month, in the Vermont State House of all places.

Dennis Steele spoke briefly on behalf of the Green Mountain Brigade. This self-described hardcore Ron Paul supporter is now encouraging Vermont residents to run for office on a secessionist platform. He also encouraged other convention delegates to come together and combine their efforts on behalf of one secessionist movement (namely, Vermont’s), in order to increase its chance of success. Just one success would serve as a catalyst for the rest of the nation.

For the first time, the Parti Quebecois sent a representative to the North American Secessionist Convention. Marcel Sauvais spoke at length about the history of the party, a political movement which developed in conjunction with a cultural rejection of Catholicism. Although the province of Quebec, with a population of 7.5 million and a land area equivalent to Scandinavia, was dominated by the Catholic Church throughout much of its history, the Parti Quebecois is a strictly secular movement. The party held its first referendum for independence in 1980, which failed in part due to the difficulty at that time of spreading countercultural and anti-federal government ideas. A second attempt in 1995 failed very narrowly; Sauvais believes there was vote fraud and that the legitimate result was that a majority of Quebecois voted to secede from Canada.

Robert Pritchard represented the Republic of Texas. Pritchard seeks to regain independence for the original Republic of Texas, whose territory included parts of what is now Oklahoma. The RoT promotes the use of cantons, as exist in Switzerland today, as well as a “virtual country” approach. There is no reason why government should have a territorial monopoly; residents should be free to choose among multiple governments. The RoT currently claims “a couple handful” of citizens.

Carolyn Chute spoke informally on behalf of the Second Maine Militia (not to be confused with the Maine Militia, a different organization), a loosely organized non-partisan group of pro-gun, anti-big business citizens. Chute, the author of several books, believes that politics grows out of culture. Maine has a unique culture that provides networking opportunities between different interest groups. There’s a very strong food sovereignty movement in the state.

The Free State Project was on the agenda (according to Mr. Sale, three participants had RSVP’ed to represent the organization), but none of those three were in attendance. As the FSP is a New Hampshire movement, there were several other participants in attendance (full disclosure: this reporter is also an FSP participant); Mr. Sale asked if any of them would like to say a few words on behalf of the organization. A man identifying himself only as “William” quickly accepted the offer. William talked about how the FSP is an effort to get 20,000 pro-liberty activists to move to New Hampshire, where they will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty and property. According to the organization’s website, it currently has almost 9000 participants signed up, with over 600 already in New Hampshire. William discussed the diversity of strategies used by FSP participants, some working within the electoral system while others pursuing alternate avenues such as civil disobedience. In the recent election, several FSP participants were elected to the New Hampshire state house.

The last delegate of the day was Sebastian Ronin, speaking on behalf of the Novacadia Alliance, which is comprised of the Canadian Maritime Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) as well as the U.S. states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. (Newfoundland is excluded.) Ronin is the former Executive Director of the BC Green Party and now resides in Nova Scotia. He believes that global industrial civilization is rapidly headed towards collapse due to Peak Oil, and that freedom-minded people should prepare themselves for massive cultural changes. The territory of Novacadia currently has a population of 5 million; its three largest cities are Halifax, Manchester and St. John. The Novacadia Independence Party is a brand-new political party that allows citizens of both Canada and the U.S. to join.

The second half of the one-day convention featured a workshop led by Dexter Clark, which presented specific tactics to use to promote the idea of secession. A last-minute addition to the agenda was a presentation by Robert Steele, a self-described “moderate Republican” with strong opinions but no apparent association with any secessionist organizations.

The convention wrapped up with a discussion of a joint resolution to be signed and issued by the delegates of the organizations in attendance. The end result, The Manchester Declaration can be viewed on the Middlebury Institute’s website.

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The Fable of the Lake Monster

Once upon a time, in a far off land, there was a large and beautiful lake. It had a number of villages along its shore.

The lake was the source of everything the villagers needed. It provided water for drinking, cleaning and bathing; fish and shellfish to eat; mud and reeds from which to manufacture buildings, rope and cloth; it attracted wildlife which could be hunted for meat and leather.

There were many such lakes throughout the land, each with villages beside it whose inhabitants depended upon the lake for their basic necessities.

And every lake contained a monster.

The lake monsters varied in size, shape, color and level of aggressiveness, but they all had one common characteristic: they were sustained and nurtured by the villagers of their native lake.

The most common manner in which villagers cared for their monsters was to throw a certain percentage of their food catch into the lake on a regular basis. The monsters, being omnivorous, would greedily eat anything: fish, fruit, vegetables, poultry, venison, even stray cats. Occasionally, a monster would come out of the water and feed directly on its own villagers. Some people found this horrifying, but most were pragmatic and accepted it as a necessary aspect of life beside a lake. Most villagers actually felt a great deal of affection for their lake monster, taking pride in the belief that theirs was the biggest, strongest, most intelligent and fearsome of any lake monster to be found anywhere. Children were taught to love their monster, to sing songs about it and tell stories about when it was just a baby monster. There could be no greater sacrifice to one’s community than to actually be eaten by the monster.

Every village was ruled by a Council of Elders. Their job was to oversee the feeding of the monster. The Elders, or their assistants, would gather up all of the food donated by the villagers and drop it into the lake at regular intervals. Serving on the Council of Elders was considered highly prestigious. It took a lot of time, effort and paperwork to ensure that a monster’s nutritional needs were met, and to make sure that every villager was paying his fair share. The food donations were too important to be left to the discretion of the villagers; therefore, the Elders put uncooperative villagers in the stockade as a form of motivation.

Jo was a resident of a small village on the shore of Lake Rika. He was born there, and spent most of his life there. Within Lake Rica, there lived a particularly crafty monster called Sammy, which swam back and forth ceaselessly under the water. Its body was so huge, its mere passing could capsize small boats. Although primarily a water creature, Sammy had wings and, on occasion, sprang forth from Lake Rika and flew off to a village beside another lake to consume villagers. For some reason, Sammy seemed to find them tastier. Or perhaps he was intelligent enough to realize that, by eating another lake’s villagers while leaving his own alive to feed him, he could wind up with twice as much to eat.

For a time in his childhood, due to poor local fishing conditions, Jo and his family had gone to live in a village on the shore of a distant lake very far away. There were numerous lakes between the two which it had been necessary for Jo’s family to rest at while making the journey. Jo had thus learned at a young age that Lake Rika was not the only lake in the world; and that Sammy was not the only lake monster. But Lake Rika was still the largest and most beautiful, and Sammy the most awe-inspiring of monsters.

As a child, Jo loved Sammy, just as the other children did. He looked forward to the annual celebration of Sammy’s birthday, when the whole village was festooned with lights and images of lake monsters (to be honest, no one was entirely certain the exact date of the monster’s birth, but the event was generally accepted to have occurred mid-summer and was celebrated at that time). He hoped that when he grew up, he could be one of the ones to be eaten; that would certainly make his parents very proud.

As an adult, Jo became an accomplished fisherman, and made a good living fishing on the lake and selling his catch in the village. Over a period of years, he earned the money to build his own fishing boat, as his parents had done before him, and his parents had done before *them*. He dutifully turned over the exact number of fishes that the Council of Elders dictated was necessary to sate Sammy’s appetite each month. He knew that everyone had to pay their share, and that Sammy was magnificent and would always protect the village from harm.

As he got a bit older, Jo began to become aware of things in the village that he had overlooked before. It wasn’t exactly true that everyone paid their share to feed Sammy; some people did, but some didn’t. Not only that, but the Council of Elders was actually taking some of the food that was collected from villagers like Jo and, instead of giving it to Sammy, was giving it to other villagers instead. This didn’t seem quite fair to Jo. Some of the recipients of donated monster food seemed truly needy through no fault of their own, but others appeared to simply be personal friends or family members of the Elders. A large number of them, it was difficult to tell how or why they were needy. The village was quite large; no one villager personally knew everyone who lived there. Jo certainly didn’t have time to get to know them all; he was too busy fishing. But still, he had a pretty good life, despite the “voluntary” lake monster feeding regulations; he ate well, was in good health, had a sturdy fishing boat… why rock it?

Sammy’s feeding forays to distant lakes became more frequent (or maybe Jo just started noticing them more than he had when he was younger). It started to really get to him. He thought of the mothers and fathers who lived on the shores of other lakes and how they must feel when Sammy ate their children. It seemed very wrong. The Council of Elders praised Sammy for his feeding frenzies, saying that he was doing the distant villagers a favor by ridding them of excess children and that they’d thank the people of Lake Rika for it once they had calmed down a bit. Jo seriously doubted this was true.

Jo knew what had to be done; the Council of Elders needed to be reformed! They were the ones who decided how much food was given to Sammy; how much of each type of food needed to be donated by different village producers (X fish, Y oranges, Z venison steaks). They were also the ones who decided which villagers got to take some of the monster haul and eat it, rather than making a donation themselves. If Jo could only get the *right* villagers appointed to the Council, then the collection and distribution of monster fodder would finally be handled in a logical and fair manner.

After a few years of working with like-minded villagers trying to get the right people on the Council of Elders, Jo started to question the efficacy of his plan. For one thing, the Council of Elders in his village was only one of many; it didn’t have much control, ultimately, over how much Sammy got fed, since every village had its own Council, and every Council was feeding the monster. For another, the Council of Elders had a monopoly on village policy, and could therefore change the rules at will if it looked like Jo actually had a decent shot at getting appointed to the Council or convincing a seated Elder to make any sort of sensible change in Sammy’s dietary planning. Meanwhile, the times when Sammy rose out of the water to feed were very unsettling, and were causing more and more ill will between the peoples of Lake Rika and the peoples of other lakes (the ones Sammy kept eating). The Council of Elders of Sammy’s village had no control over this at all. It all seemed like a bit of a fool’s quest.

More years went by, and Jo became acquainted with a very small group of radical villagers who proposed a quite shocking idea: Sammy was not magnificent. In fact, Sammy was a terrible drain on the energy of the village and its inhabitants. He ate an increasingly large portion of the food; his care absorbed the time and energy of some of the best minds in the village, people who might otherwise have been devising innovative new ways to catch fish, or teach the children, or design more energy-efficient mud huts. A very few villagers said that there was something inherently *wrong* with people feeding a monster. Villagers don’t need a Council of Elders. Monsters don’t deserve to be fed.

Jo had trouble swallowing this. Living without a lake monster was not an option, was it? All villagers needed a lake monster, just as every lake monster needed villagers. To question this was the most unspeakable of heresies. And besides, Sammy wasn’t nearly as bad as a lot of other monsters Jo had heard about. Some monsters were truly cancerous, eating such a large percentage of their villagers’ food that the villagers themselves starved to death as a result… or eating so many of the children that villages lost entire generations of citizens, with almost no one left to keep the gardens growing, the fish nets filled, and to take care of the elderly. Surely his own Council of Elders was doing good and necessary work; without them, how would Sammy get fed? If anything were to happen to Sammy, perhaps an even worse monster would move into the lake to take his place.

After months of thinking about this, Jo came to the realization that it was true: villagers *didn’t* need a Council of Elders. Feeding a monster did not make sense. Gaining control of the Council of Elders, which was appearing increasingly unlikely as it was, wouldn’t solve the ultimate problem: what to do about Lake Rika’s man-eating lake monster.

The anti-Council villagers tried to spread their ideas by making colorful signs and banners. They wrote new anti-monster songs and stories, and talked to everyone they came into contact with about their radical ideas. It was a very hard sell; the vast majority of villagers had been taught from earliest childhood that lake monsters were a necessary part of life, and that Sammy was a particularly benevolent lake monster.

A handful of anti-Council villagers tried innovative methods of getting their message across. Some threw rocks at the monster. A few of them charged full-speed ahead directly into Sammy’s open mouth and hung out in his belly, for days or even weeks. (As long as Sammy didn’t chew them, this didn’t seem to harm them.) However, it was not very comfortable or interesting sitting in a lake monster’s gut (not to mention the stench…). But these villagers seemed confident that this would help to demonstrate to people that Sammy was not a net positive for the village. Jo had his doubts about the efficacy of this plan, too; if villagers were unfazed by having their *own children* eaten by a lake monster, he didn’t think that seeing a few strangers jump into the monster’s mouth was going to help much. It certainly didn’t hurt Sammy any, and it really seemed to annoy the Council of Elders, as well as some of those who were attempting to take control of it in order to reduce the monster’s diet.

Jo’s head was so preoccupied from thinking about all of this, he was having trouble focusing on his fishing. Sometimes it just seemed easier to hang out in the corner pub, drinking ale until closing time, to blot it all out. He knew that he not only needed to catch enough fish to feed himself and his family, and to pay his share of the monster’s feed (which he only paid at this point to keep himself out of the village stockade), he also needed to make sure he had enough fish left over to trade for dried oranges and venison to get through the winter when the edges of the lake froze over, which would make fishing impossible.

There were disturbing signs of a coming shortage of fish, and of the reeds from which fishing nets were woven. Jo wasn’t sure how he would manage if he became unable to fish. He did have a small garden, and was brushing up on his deer hunting skills, but still, it wouldn’t be enough if the fish stopped biting. There were credible rumors that the Council of Elders, as well as the Grand Council located in the swamp down at the foot of the lake, were making plans to increase the monster food ration by a lot. Jo knew that if things got really bad, and there were a large number of needy villagers screaming to the Council that they needed more fish to eat, the Council would simply take whatever Jo had managed to put away for the winter in order to redistribute it (unless he managed to hide it somehow). They might even take his boat, making it impossible for him to catch any more fish. He didn’t even want to think about the “Peak Fish” theory some villagers were talking about.

Jo spent some time researching lakes other than Lake Rika, wondering if there were any without monsters (or at least with very small, weak ones that didn’t eat much). It didn’t look too promising, though. Almost all charted lakes had monsters, and the villages on the shores of the few that didn’t were highly selective about letting new villagers move in. Jo couldn’t really blame them! Not only that, but the Council of Elders of his own village had contacts throughout the land, and found ways to enforce the voluntary donation of lake monster rations by all citizens of Lake Rika, even if they no longer lived on the shores of that lake.

It seemed to Jo that there were a limited number of options for a hard-working villager who’d had the lake monster scales removed from his eyes:

1) accept the status quo, keep feeding the lake monster, keep his head down and his eyes on his boat, and pray that the fish kept biting

2) continue trying to gain control of the Council of Elders, and if successful, thereby have some small say in the makeup of Sammy’s diet

3) stop contributing to the monster’s rations, and see how long it took the Elders to throw him in the stockade, take his fishing boat and all of his winter savings

4) find a way to convince a great number of other villagers that it’s not right to feed a monster and get them to stop. It wouldn’t take much of a reduction in Sammy’s food tribute for him to feel it. He would undoubtedly get angry… very angry. The Council of Elders would feel threatened. What would happen then, Jo couldn’t even imagine.

Jo took his boat out on the lake, with the nets pulled in, just to get away from the village and think about it all.

to be continued…..

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Yesterday was the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. In the United States, that means it was election day. It boggles my mind how much time, energy and money is poured into this annual event, which becomes especially crazed every four years when it includes the election of the President. On the radio the other day I heard that it’s estimated that $8 has been spent for every vote that will be cast for President. On a local level, I have several personal acquaintances who have spent hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of dollars campaigning for themselves or others.

Like the Ron Paul Revolution of last year, this whole phenomenon leaves me cold. It’s like a fever that almost everyone I know has caught, but I seem to be immune. Call me crazy, but if every single so-called liberty lover who is running for office in New Hampshire this cycle succeeds in getting elected to the state house, I don’t see how that’s going to affect my life one bit. The state is in a deep financial hole. The country is in a financial hole so deep, there’s no possible way to climb out of it. It’s like a train without brakes that’s screaming downhill, and all these people are fighting tooth and nail to get a hold of the controls; it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a train without brakes screaming downhill! No matter who’s steering, we’re all gonna go splat.

So this is how I spent this Tuesday. First, I went to work. I earned a full day’s wages, and I’m using those wages to bolster my personal financial position. Maybe I’ll pay off a little more of my grad school debt. Maybe I’ll buy a soon-to-be-outlawed gun.

Secondly, I voted. Long-time readers of this blog and/or viewers of the Ridley Report may recall my stating several months ago that, thanks to the rantings of Stefan Molyneux among others, I have come to the conclusion that politics is inherently immoral. I still believe that. But at the same time, I ain’t no pacifist… if an abusive political system is going to be shoved down my throat, I’m going to take what tiny action I can to minimize my pain. L. Neil Smith put it so well on his blog, I’ll just quote him here: “I have no use for those who fastidiously disdain to protect themselves or their loved ones, either with weapons or by voting defensively. I tried that path for a while, myself, and it leads directly to where we are now, a broken subject people, nearly in chains.”

One thing I’m *not* doing is running for office myself, or helping anyone else do so. I’ve had a few debates with myself about this. At times, I had to stop my hand from writing a check for personal friends for whom I have great respect who are running for office here in New Hampshire. But the truth is, I think they’re misguided. Downsize DC, an organization I admire and sponsor financially, explained my opinion better than I could myself in one of their almost-daily dispatches during the past week, so I’ll just quote them here (gee, this copy and paste thing is neat!):

Today we’ll compare the cases of Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul, and John Stossel, beginning with this . . .

If you oppose fiat currency and centralized government banking, and would like to abolish the Federal Reserve and legal tender laws in favor of free market banking and free market money . . .

And you think the best way to achieve these things is to put the right people — people who believe as you do — in positions of power, then . . .

It would have been reasonable to assume, prior to seeing him in action, that Alan Greenspan was the “right person” to head the Federal Reserve.

You could have justifiably assumed, based on Greenspan’s previous writings and statements, that he would use his position to not only control the damage done by the Fed, but also to argue for its abolition.

None of these things happened. Instead, the opposite happened. Greenspan betrayed every economic principle he had previously professed. Putting a presumed “right person” in a position of power did not have the right result.

To contrast with this example we can compare the case of Ron Paul. Ron Paul has always said the right things, and done the right things too.

Two different “right people” have produced two different results. What are we to conclude from this?

We conclude that you cannot tell in advance whether or not you’re entrusting power to the “right person.” The person you trust might turn out to behave like Ron Paul, or like Alan Greenspan. This means there is a huge probability that the time and money you invest in a presumed “right person” will turn out to be wasted.

Even if your chances of actually choosing a “right person who will behave in the right way” is as good as 50-50, that still means your time and money will have been invested to zero result. The good work of the 50% of “right people who do right” will be cancelled out by the bad actions of the people who betray your trust.

But we think it’s even worse than that. We do not think the attempt to choose “right people who will actually do right things” can possibly produce anything close to 50-50 results, even assuming that a majority of other voters choose as you do. The reason for this is simple . . .

The incentives of government power are structured to entice the people who have power to do bad things. We could choose many examples to bolster this claim, but there is one huge example that should suffice . . .

The Republicans told us for years that they would reduce the size of government, if only the voters would give them full control of both Congress and the White House. Eventually they gained that full control, and look what they delivered — the hugest spending increases ever.

We believe this example is devastating to the “elect the right people” strategy. And lest you think the problem is merely a Republican problem, just get ready for what the Democrats do. Obama has already betrayed his supposed principles in the case of his warrantless spying vote, and we predict more betrayals to come. Obama is not change, he is stasis.

We are supposed to be able to rely on the Democrats to protect civil liberties, and upon the Republicans to control government spending, but we cannot, because the incentives encourage the constant expansion of centralized government power in all directions.

And the prospects for a third-party solution are even worse, given winner-takes-all voting, gerrymandering, campaign finance laws, and a persistent partisan tribalism that limits the extent to which any third party can ever grow.

But there’s a further problem. How do you get a majority of Americans to vote for your supposed “right person?” You might argue for education to achieve this goal, but assertions are easier than results. The difficulty is highlighted by the example of John Stossel of ABC . . .

John Stossel has a mighty megaphone. His voice is far larger than that of any other person or institution advocating for downsized government. Every few months he produces excellent hour-long shows puncturing the myths of government programs. He reaches more people more powerfully than all other downsizing advocates combined. If you missed his latest installment, we strongly urge you to watch it.

But . . .

Even John Stossel’s mighty megaphone produces but a whisper in a hurricane. Aligned against Stossel’s one-hour shows are around-the-clock news coverage, political advertising, and teaching in our schools that constantly promotes the idea of more-and-more government “solutions.”

Even John Stossel, with his mighty megaphone, is fighting a losing battle.

The only way to win the battle is to have superior forces and superior funding. It will require a huge army that funds outreach capable of reaching everyone, everywhere, EVERY DAY. But what kind of institution could build such a force?

Will a think tank or a political party do it? We think not. Think tanks are think tanks. They are NOT grassroots organizing vehicles. Political parties ARE grassroots organizing vehicles, but to convince someone to join you must NOT ONLY convince them of your ideas, you MUST ALSO convince them to betray their old identity. It’s a doubly difficult task. Or . . .

If the vehicle you choose is a third party then the task is triply difficult, because the rules are rigged against you, and to change the rules you would need resources of people and money that the rules themselves prevent you from obtaining. We speak from experience.

We are humbly suggesting that we need a non-partisan, or even anti-partisan institution that educates, recruits, and imposes pressure on the politicians, all at the same time. We further suggest that such an institution should be structured so as to impose the smallest possible cost on each individual participant, so as to maximize both recruitment and participation.

I’ll drink to that.

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