The NBFP encourages the migration of libertarian and liberty-oriented Canadians to a relatively small, coastal, Conservative-voting province of New Brunswick with the goal of restoring, expanding, and preserving liberty. The movement advocates for building a vibrant, free-market economy, and increasing New Brunswick’s political and fiscal autonomy within Confederation.

Over 700 people have expressed their interest in participating via registering in an online database, with 30–40 core members attending face-to-face strategic meetings in the province. Some 25 “liberty pods” (micro-communities) have been created across the province. The organization is soon to be incorporated as a not-for-profit organization, a status that allows political campaigning and collecting donations tax-free. The bylaws will be based on those adopted by the Free State Project. As of late, they are also looking for a communications director.

Strategically, the FreeProvince Project pursues four goals: inspiring liberty-minded individuals to move to New Brunswick, assisting them with relocation, educating people in the spirit of liberty and the rule of law, and organizing face-to-face events to build a strong community. The project does not promote specific political candidates or parties — instead, it encourages its activists to self-organize in a decentralized, bottom-up manner.

For context, the New Hampshire based, Free State Project that the NBFP was based off of was proposed in 2001 by Yale graduate Jason Sorens and created a response to the failure of the Libertarian Party to win national elections in the US with New Hampshire being chosen in 2003 and new movers coming soon after. The proposition was to move 20,000 libertarians to the small purple state of New Hampshire in Northern New England and work with locals to create a decentralized block of activists that would push for libertarian policies. Taking into account its lack of a state income tax, state sales tax and mandatory car insurance.

As of 2023, they have anywhere from 6232 to 9000 members in a state of roughly 1.3 million people but have successfully managed to successfully push for the legalization of statewide permitless concealed carry of firearms, abolition of stingray usage by the police without a warrant, prohibition of the use of state and local police from enforcing federal gun regulations, abolition of the death penalty, restrictions on the teaching of Critical Race Theory by public school teachers, creating an amendment in the state constitution preventing the future establishment of a state income tax, establishing school choice through their Educational Freedom Accounts and prohibiting the state government from enforcing vaccine mandates. The FSP has been so far extremely effective in keeping New Hampshire the freest state in America according to the Cato Institute's Freedom in the 50 States index: https://www.freedominthe50states.org/

The idea to create a FreeProvince and emulate this strategy, by making use of Canada's federal system (particularly sections 91 and 92 of the Constitution Act of 1867 which clarify property and civil rights being the exclusive jurisdiction of the provinces) was proposed in 2021 by former Canadian army veteran and civil rights activist in the Grand River Land Dispute, Mark Vandermaas. This being a response to Canada’s intrusive lockdown policies and the failure of the People's Party of Canada to influence policy at a federal level, also noting that the amount of people who voted for the People's Party was over 840,000 and that New Brunswick has roughly 569,000 eligible voters. The NBFP has received ample help from individual Free Staters and Mark has recently appeared at their flagship freedom festival known as PorcFest to give a talk and gauge support.

The project specifically focuses on influencing the three key policy areas on a provincial level: education, policing, and healthcare. On top of that, individual community members and micro-communities (“liberty pods”) are involved in numerous initiatives, for instance, enhancing school choice options, expanding self-defense rights, protecting freedom of speech and religious freedom, lowering taxes, defending property rights, and so on.

If you would like to learn more, please visit the website at nbfree.ca

And, if you'd like to learn more about the project that inspired the NBFP you can go to fsp.org

Look up their community wiki to see the bills they've managed to pass at: https://libertywin.org/index.php/Main_Page

Or watch the latest documentary about the FSP by NBC Boston here: https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/coming-soon-life-liberty-and-the-pursuit-of-new-hampshire/2961708/

We at Objective Standard Institute have set up a brand new, beginner-friendly Discord server dedicated to Objectivism – the rational, fact-based philosophy for advancing freedom and human flourishing, developed by Ayn Rand but extending much beyond her.

Here you can learn and discuss philosophy and politics, meet other bright and independent thinkers, join our weekly catch-up / discussion that tends to last 12 hours because no one wants to leave...etc.

Anyone is welcome in this community, whether you are familiar with Objectivism and Rand's ideas or not. If you are interested in learning about and promoting freedom by engaging with complex and sometimes difficult ideas, this is definitely the community for you!

Join link: https://discord.gg/fg252t5uRm

I would need a dam.

You see, the easiest way to change the world is to destroy something someone else built. It's much easier to destroy something than build something.

In this case, because we are not evil people, the dam is metaphorical, the dam is the State.

A dam holds something back to obtain a benefit from the fact that water needs to fall towards gravity. The State holds back people's liberty to extract money from their need to live.

Destroying a real world dam is almost always a dick move, resulting in all uncontrolled chaos of water and consequences. But destroying the State is too, unleashing chaotic human flow in an environment of uncertainty.

Take a lesson from history, how monarchy was destroyed. Destroyed with much tears, lives lost, and uncertainty, but ONLY because people had a model being championed to move towards.

I suggest that we need a model, a model that has a claim to moral superiority.

For this reason I take aim at democracy. Democracy can certainly better than things that came before it, but it is not an inherently ethical political system.

Democracy is in fact a tyranny, a tyranny of the majority. And I refuse to support a tyrannical system just on the basis of it being slightly less thank than the thing that came before.

What is the difference between told what to do by a king or autocrat versus being told what to do by the group-will as decided by a vote? In either case you are being told what to do.

A truly radical and vastly more preferable system for the masses would be one that allows each individual to choose their preferred system for themselves.

Only one problem, no one has yet figured out how to create such a system and implement it, much less how to transition.

Such a system is tantamount to a decentralized political system, and must begin from the standpoint of methodological-individualism.

Meaning we will focus on the actions of individuals and build a political from the ground up.

Votes can be conducted as now but with one important change: majorities no longer rule. Instead votes are just grouping-discovery.

If you vote the same, or substantially the same, across of range of issues as another person, chances are you guys share the same values and would enjoy living in the same community together. Much higher likelihood that you'd be friends with these kinds of people.

So the next step is for people who vote substantially the same to group together and form communities of legal agreement. Meaning private communities where everyone has adopted the same rules. Think of them as large gated committed, potentially town sized. Many of these together form a city with law at the city level which everyone involved agrees upon as well--this being more abstract law, as the more abstract and basic law is the more people tend to agree with it (with constitutional law being the base level of abstraction in the extreme, codifying rules of the game and basic rights).

But all of this is academic without a place to build it. Luckily there is a place: the ocean, seasteading. The ocean has the added benefit of making it very cheap to move floating property, which facilitates the grouping system above.

Both of these idea face significant challenges to get them off the ground, but this is at least plausible.

What is increasingly less plausible is convincing the USA to make a radical move in the direction of liberty. Had the West not existed, the Soviet Union would never have collapsed, it was only by comparison in results that they gave up on the bad means of communism.

Today the bad means is democracy in the West, and the West will not give up on it unless a proven model that does better than democracy already exists to point the way.

That is what this decentralized political system can provide, that contrast and way forward for those who are, right now, losing faith in democracy, without any help from us, because of how easy democracy has proven to subvert.

Once people live in a system that is premised on their own individual choice, that becomes a primary political value for those living in that society. And it becomes something others around the world envy, because they do not have it, even now they do not have it.

People can easily switch system by moving into the ocean, there are no barriers to moving into the ocean today and living there, no political barriers, only practical ones, and the practical ones are falling by the day.

Therefore I see it as only a matter of time. The ocean provides the needed preconditions for a society like this to exist, thus it will easily be made to exist and almost cannot be stopped. Because when you can move your house and property for virtually no cost, nothing holds you in a place you don't want to be.

And what's more, this condition will likely extend into the infinite future, because while the ability to move your property cheaply exists on the ocean and not on land, in space it's even cheaper to move your property. Space is more like the ocean than like the land in this respect.

And the distant future of humanity will necessarily be living in space itself. Only space has the room, energy, and resources for humanity to grow past billions into trillions of human beings, plus all the artificial intelligences we will come to rely on in their quadrillions.

My theory is that people will not become political en masse short of being forced to by circumstances (people became political in Venezuela when they began to starve, and political in Ukraine when Russia invaded). People will absorb the values of the culture and political system they find themselves in.

If they find themselves in a system premised on methodological-individualism (MI), they will come to defend that as part of the system.

Such a system also has the virtue, for ancaps, of doing what the people want the State to do without actually being or forming a state in fact. That is, such a system can still have law, police, courts, even welfare systems, all without unethical coercion, because all these systems are opt-in systems.

Libertarians are rationalists. Their opinions are based on principles and reason. However, most people are empiricists and base their opinions on experience. All the well reasoned arguments in the world won't change the mind of an empiricist. For the opinions of empiricists to change, their experiences must change. This is where the Universal Self Employ Movement is useful to the libertarian cause. The movement converts employees into independent contractors. Each worker essentially becomes a small business. When empiricists experience running a small business, their opinions will become capitalistic. That would be a big boost for libertarianism. Go to www.usemovement.org for more information.

Let me introduce you to a new type of demagogic argument that I recently learned from Russian Wiki "Ruxpert" (I won't give you the link, as otherwise Reddit will delete my post).

Instead of translating it I will try to retell (and expand it) it by illustrating it with examples.

Example #1:

User A: Bullying of disabled kids in schools is a real problem. Just yesterday my son got bullied.

User B: This is because your kid is not Batman too weak. He just needs to become stronger.

Example #2

User A: We need the police to protect our property.

User B: Everyone just needs to become like Batman. People just need to buy rifles, train hard to become good marksmen and they will need no police to protect their property.

Example #3

User A: Trans people need to undergo a gender-affirming surgery, but many of them can't afford it.

User B: If they really need it, they will become like Batman, work very hard, save like crazy, and in the end they will get enough money to pay for the surgery. And if they won't achieve this, then it just means that they don't really need it in the first place.

Why it's demagogical: Some individuals can indeed become "like Batman", but this is NOT a solution that is feasible for the majority of people affected by given problem.

Although, sometimes it can be NOT demagogical if following scheme expected to happen:

1.Person A is affected by general problem X and thinks that something must be done about this general problem (like maybe, new laws or regulations).

2.Person B shows person A, that person A can "become like Batman", thus solving this problem personally for themselves.

3.Person A agrees that this is feasible for them and stops thinking that general problem X must be solved, as they found their personal solution for this problem.

UPDATE:

I finally found a way to formulate "Argument ad Batman" in more general terms, without examples. I suggest you to give it a shot, as I think that you could misunderstand me (that is fairly easy, given my over-relience on examples in the post). It goes like this:

Suppose there is some problem X that affects some big group of people. We know that people who are very good at Y can avoid/resolve this problem for themselves. But only small part of this group can get very good at Y. So becoming very good at Y is likely to be a bad solution for the group as the whole. If you propose to unknown random members of this group (or the whole group) to "become very good at Y" as solution, then you do "Argumentum ad Batman".

We should all be fine with that

I am currently undertaking two book projects. One of the books is being published by Rowman & Littlefield under the "Polycentricity: Studies in Institutional Diversity and Voluntary Governance" series, and the other is being published by Palgrave Macmillan under the "Studies in Classical Liberalism" series.

I was wondering if you'd be interested in contributing a chapter to one of the books. The subject of both books is world governance.

The first book is tentatively titled Taking Polycentricity Global: Reassessing Libertarianism in International Relations. There has been a big push lately in the academic libertarian world to blend the Bloomington School of Elinor Ostrom with the Austrian School of FA Hayek. There's been some cool stuff to come out of the insights. One avenue that has not yet been blended by this synthesis is international relations, even though both schools of thought are ardently internationalist.

The second book is tentatively titled Decentering Hegemony: Reassessing Libertarianism in International Relations. This one is aimed at knocking the US off its perch as the focal point for so much IR scholarship in libertarian circles, by looking at alternatives to the Westphalian state system (which is what "non-interventionism" relies upon) and asking tough questions about its logic.

There are two tasks for the books: 1) to bury the myth of "non-interventionism as libertarian" once and for all, and 2) to provide scholars, policymakers, students, diplomats, and military officers with some cutting edge research on the world as it actually is (or was!).

Both books are going to be tied into a Special Issue at Cosmos + Taxis, a niche academic journal, that I am currently guest editing. The Issue is titled "Sovereignties, World Orders, and Federalist Alternatives: Reassessing Libertarian Foreign Policy," and it has 17 chapters (8 are from libertarians) that went through a brutal triple-blind peer review process. Contributors include an anthropologist, a political geographer, several political scientists and theorists, a couple of economists, one or two historians, and a couple of lawyers. I want the books to have the same quality and audaciousness.

Some possible topics that I think would be of interest to you include (this is not an exhaustive list, please feel free to pitch your own idea):

If you are interested in contributing a chapter to either books, please shoot me an email (brandon.l.christensen@gmail.com) and include "Polycentric/Decentering Projects" in the subject line.