Free State Project

In 2001 a political science PhD student at Yale University called upon his fellow libertarians to move to New Hampshire, with the eventual goal of taking over the state government. “Once we’ve accomplished these things, we can bargain with the national government over reducing the role of the national government in our state,” he wrote in an essay in The Libertarian Enterprise. “We can use the threat of secession as leverage to do this.” Decades later, the Free State Project claims that thousands have moved to the state to vote for libertarians and run for office. In 2004 Jason Sorens, the founder of the organization, conceded that his fomenting essay “overemphasizes the possibility of secession. Nevertheless, I think it’s still of historical interest.”